That’s not my memory of it. I recall getting borked by the timing at the traffic circle and somewhere underground at the end with a timed sequence. And of course not having good enough saved files. Am I misremembering, or has it gotten more merciful in subsequent editions?
2 Likes
Hm. It’s been quite a while since I played, but I might have just gotten lucky on my playthrough and not run into either of those issues. Anyone else know how merciful or cruel this game is?
2 Likes
I think it was always meant to be merciful, but there were a couple of bugs that could break it. Some things have also been clarified, to make it more obvious that the player is not actually stuck.
3 Likes
Chapter III – Ettin in Ear
Last time, we’d finished retrieving Andra’s stuff (money, top-secret plans, a passive-aggressive letter from her brother) and Alex’s as well (a fancy monocle and a flash drive whose contents we don’t yet fully understand). We’ve only got one more goal at the moment – get to the Counterfeit Monkey, a bar by the docks, to meet Slango, who seems to be a member of our crew. Hopefully he can help us get out of here!
It’s going to be a bit of a trek, though – we just left the park, so we’ll need to make our way to the roundabout at the center of the city, then make our way to the harbor:
Though with that said, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s presently on our tail, and anyway in case someone is we might want to throw them off our scent, so let’s do some sightseeing first! There’s not much going on at our current location, which is mostly a hub area:
Monumental Staircase
Once, the central hillock of the city was a fortified enclave, protected from the harbor and the peasant town by great walls. Now, however, the walls are mostly gone, except for a little spur that runs north from here. The walkways and tower are open to the public.Meanwhile a staircase as wide as a street descends east from the town square toward the harbor.
An enormous blue and orange warning poster covers the wall alongside the staircase.
We can go north, south to Heritage Corner, southwest to Fair, east, and west to Park Center from here.
>x poster
“WARNING: Have you seen these dangerous individuals? If so, avoid contact and report all interactions to the Bureau of Orthography.” Below, there’s a picture of several people. One of them is you, before your face got shuffled with mine. It’s funny that when we met, you mentioned you were a user of illegally modified language-tools, but you didn’t emphasize the grand larceny side so much.
Not to worry. I won’t turn you in. I can hardly afford to, can I?
That’s a little worrisome, but we already knew the authorities were on to Andra – thus the operation – so nothing to get too upset about.
>x walls
A square park stretches east, with official buildings beyond, occupying what was once the fortified heart of town.
A little of the original fortification does exist immediately north and curving around to the northwest, but it is in very bad shape here, and the top of the walls cannot be walked on at this point.
Ooh, the original walls – that seems like a sight worth seeing!
>n
Old City Walls
Only portions of the old walls still stand, but you can walk along what remains, as though you were defending the place. They’re a meter and a half wide, made of ashlar blocks. On the vertical faces these blocks are still rough, but underfoot they have been worn smooth by the passage of many defenders and (subsequently) tourists. One of the blocks in the wall has even been defaced, some old inscription gouged out.I used to like to climb around up here when I was a kid. I made believe – oh, you’ll think it’s silly.
Down below in the distance are the docks and the sea, and immediately east of here is an old hexagonal turret.
Something makes you think of my youthful pranks.
Oh eek, as the parent of a three-year-old who loves to climb and tumble everywhere, getting this memory in this place is making me nervous.
>remember pranks
Oh, I used to play that I was an Atlantean guard defending the battlements against invading redcoats, armed only with a saber and an, uh, an o-removing musket. So they turned into red cats, you see. My mother explained later that letter removal hadn’t ever taken the form of muskets and that I had my chronology wrong. So I do know better.
And my father gave me an even longer and even less interesting lecture about how the British colonial government wasn’t entirely a bad thing and how it didn’t do to be too gleeful about mentally shooting some young soldier who probably didn’t have a choice about being there.
Whew, that could have been worse! Though I didn’t think letter-removers could add new spaces to the names of things – guess Alex’s mom didn’t want to get too in the weeds!
>x blocks
To judge by its different shaping and color, the defaced block is something borrowed from an older building to make up the new wall: taken out of a church or a mosque or perhaps even a Roman fortification in some earlier era of the island.
It was once inscribed with a message, but whatever it was, the foreign-language writing has been completely chiseled away so as to be illegible.
Mosques, huh? Exactly how long ago was the Spanish era? And Roman ruins, too? This is quite the history of occupation and settlement, here.
As for the effaced inscription, this is non-standard, but I still wonder…
>put gel on block
The gel has no ability to restore that which was physically damaged; only letter-changes can be removed.
Ah well, worth a try. Anyway not much else here so let’s move on.
>n
Crumbling Wall Face
The wall once continued north from here some distance before curving northwest around the remainder of the city. So much has crumbled away, though, that the walkway is impassable north of this point. To protect citizens, there is a safety railing across the broken edge.A metal ladder of four rungs descends the inner face of the wall, allowing pedestrians access to the streets to the west.
Among the rubble fill of the wall is an odd spiral-shaped rock.
Only a couple pieces of scenery:
>x railing
Though it shows traces of surface rust, the safety railing is sturdy and close-fitted enough to prevent anyone, child or adult, from taking a tumble down the jagged masonry.
(And yes, it’s a “safety railing”, so we can’t make it ailing or riling).
>x ladder
The rungs have been bolted individually into the stone.
>remove l from ladder
We reset the device to l. The device buzzes, puzzled. It has tried to create a “meta adder”: evidently “ladder” is too tightly bound to its modifiers and can’t be manipulated separately. Or perhaps it just doesn’t have sufficient power to handle the metal ladder.
Ah well, so much for our hopes of conversing with a fourth-wall-breaking snake.
Let’s check out that separately-called-out rock:
>x wall
The spiral rock turns out to be a fossil, from one of those sea creatures long ago.
“One of those sea creatures” probably means it’s something common – probably a trilobite or ammonite?
>x fossil
It is perhaps an inch and a half long, the shape of a corkscrew seashell that once housed something small and soft. There are thousands of these things around; they’re not exactly valuable, but an interesting curiosity all the same.
The latter, then. I’ll grab it, since I’m not sure I agree about “not exactly valuable”:
>remove s from fossil
We reset the device to s. There is a smell of anise, and the fossil turns into a foil. One of those long springy swords used for fencing. It has a button at the tip to prevent harm to one’s opponent.
…okay, that’s more marginally useful than I’d hoped – every good IF protagonist could use a cutting tool.
>x button
A tiny cylindrical cap of red rubber.
>take it
It’s not made to come off easily: this isn’t a sword for actually hurting people.
At this point I check my inventory, and remember that I’d wanted to close my backpack but had neglected to do so until this point. Oops! I also decide to move west towards Webster Court instead of checking out the turret, which is the last piece of the old walls, but in retrospect that was a weird order to do things so let’s jump out of order to wrap up this section:
Old Hexagonal Turret
Up here we stand on the remains of the old fortifications; this turret offers a view out over the docks, the fish market, and the harbor, which it was designed to protect.A heavy old depluralizing cannon is aimed out to sea.
>x docks
A harbor swarming with small and medium-sized tourist boats; most of the major shipping comes in via another route.
That is where we are trying to get to – or rather, get through.
>x market
From this angle and distance, all you can see is the open space and a few awnings. It’s not the best time of day for this kind of thing anyway.
>x harbor
A harbor swarming with small and medium-sized tourist boats; most of the major shipping comes in via another route.
>x monkey
I can’t see what you’re talking about.
Guess it’s too small, or tucked off the main roads, to be visible from here.
>x cannon
Like a conventional cannon it has a mounting to allow the users to turn the gun and change its angle, to hit objects at various ranges.
It is currently unloaded, of course; but time was when this vast weapon was employed to reduce entire fleets to a single ship, and a whole crew of marines to a single man. This tactic was found so effective that the harbor was never successfully taken.
Not much to do here yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this wound up playing host to a big set-piece later on.
We’re just about done playing tourist, so let’s round things out with a look through the guidebook. The walls don’t have a separate listing that I could find, but the turret does:
]The Guidebook explains that Atlantis’ harbors were traditionally defended by the depluralizing cannon, using techniques discovered by Clarence Arbot in 1779. Turrets along the old city walls provided elevated positions for these cannons, allowing them considerable range. See also SECESSION, CLARENCE ARBOT.
Oh, I hadn’t realized this had historical information, not just geographic info! And now we’ve got a date for when word-alteration tech kicked off in earnest, which largely aligns with what we’d speculated. Let’s check out the cross-references:
>look up secession
The secession of Atlantis from British governance in 1823 culminated in the reduction of the attacking British fleet on April 19. The holiday celebrates this occasion, which is considered the beginning of Atlantean self-rule.
>look up arbot
A little copperplate engraving of a man with heavy-lidded eyes accompanies the sidebar biography of Clarence Arbot: b. 1732, proud parent of some 19 children; tireless researcher who in later years rarely left his laboratory “except to go to bed”; in 1779, the inventor of generic depluralization, allowing multiples of almost anything to be reduced to just one. What his wives thought of his research is not recorded. See also DEPLURALIZING CANNON.
…I’m assuming it’s “wives” because at least one didn’t make it all the way through giving birth to 19 kids, rather than a pre-independence tradition of Atlantean polygamy.
(DEPLURALIZING CANNON just points back to the turret section).
Okay, now let’s head off the walls and go down to Webster Court:
Webster Court
Here below the wall is a broad, plainly-paved court.Lending its name to the location is a bronze statue of Noah Webster. My mother likes to irritate my father by quoting what his contemporaries called Webster: a “viper”, a “maniacal pedant”, and (always a favorite at Reform Day parties) “a toad in the service of sans-culottism”. She makes sure to pronounce that in the most Parisian accent possible.
The large building just to the north – yes, the one in pale pink – is my parents’ home. I think I mentioned that my parents were well off. My father works for the Bureau, embarrassingly, and my mother was born into the kind of money that we like to pretend doesn’t exist on this island.
The streets continue south, east, and west; and just to the northeast is my parents’ side garden.
Oh, this is an exciting bit of information! Not that Alex is a rich kid whose dad works for the baddies – that’s not especially surprising – but the Webster statue. See, one thing that’s been bugging me is that despite the fact that Atlantis won its independence from the UK significantly after the US did, it uses American spelling rather than the British ones. In Doyleist terms, obviously that’s because Short’s an American (or at least, an American-born expat as I believe she’s lived in the UK for a long time now) writing for an American audience, but seems like Noah Webster has something to do with the Watsonian explanation. And sure enough:
>x statue
It’s that hero of spelling reform, and personally responsible for the island going over to Americanized spellings over the British standard.
I’d play that prequel.
My happiness at this statue is only deepened by this great gag:
>remove u from statue
We reset the device to u. The device chokes on the concept, though my mother might say that this whole island is already the State of Noah Webster.
Okay, Alex unsurprisingly keeps harping on his parents, so let’s check out his digs:
>x house
It’s stucco and tile, inspired by southern California ideas of gracious living. There are potted palm trees inside, and leather sofas, and French oil paintings for which expensive importation licenses had to be bought.
My childhood bedroom faces northwest, away from the docks, towards the roofs of other villas and the open sea.
>x door
Walking into my parents’ house is the action perhaps most likely to get us caught.
Yeah let’s not do that, but maybe we can sate Alex’s homesickness by visiting his back yard?
>ne
Patriotic Chard-Garden
A narrow strip of land between the house and the edge of my parents’ property. The eastern edge runs right up to the decaying old wall of the city, which here means some stumpy masonry on this side and a dizzying drop on the other.The rest of their terraces and gardens are fenced off.
A little chard still grows in the nearest bed, carefully tended to thrive in this climate.
Because it’s so linguistically productive, chard is something of a national symbol; and during the world wars, there was a fad of gardening at home. After the war, it became common for affluent people with a little bit of land to keep their garden, so that if you were down on your luck you could glean a few leaves.
Yeah, there are a bunch of words you can get from chard (card, char, chad…), so this makes some sense – Victory Gardens wouldn’t be just about feeding the household but potentially contributing to the war effort.
>x chard
Some leafy greens that might make an okay side salad, if we were feeling hungry.
>take it
We pick the chard, leaving bare soil behind.
A flicker of curtains from inside the house suggests that someone saw us – a cleaner, possibly. But then there is a voice, not audible except as a confident rising and falling tone; this will be my mother, saying not to worry and not to interfere.
Uh oh, are we rumbled? But wait, we’re in a different body than they’re expecting, and Alex said it’s normal for indigent folks to snag some chard when they’re hungry, so hopefully they’ve just taken us for some down-on-her-luck vagabond (they wouldn’t be far off!)
Well, what’s done is done, might as well do some chard-permuting:
>remove h from chard
We reset the device to h. With a distinct whiff of crisp, snappy cardboard, the chard turns into a card. Not a playing card, as I might have expected, or a calling card, or even an index card, but a Tarot card, representing the Chariot. The vehicle is drawn by two prize horses, one black, one white. The driver appears to be having some difficulty keeping them together, to judge from the surly expression and the raised whip.
Oh, that’s interesting! Per Waite, the Chariot represents “succour, providence; also war, triumph, presumption, vengeance, trouble.” Reversed, meanwhile is “riot, quarrel, dispute, litigation, defeat.” So overall general resonance to our situation, though of course the two-horses-one-vehicle imagery is particularly apposite. Getting this particular card does raise questions about the mechanics of consensual reality apply to prophecy, though I suppose “mystically relevant to one’s immediate circumstances” is part of how most people would picture a Tarot card.
Let’s try chad:
It’s one of those little pieces of paper punched out when you mark a ballot, which makes it small and nearly useless, except as a potent symbol of election fraud.
Man, that takes me back.
That’s good enough for now, I think – maybe we’ll find some use for a chard-derivative soon.
In terms of scenery, the wall’s not especially interesting:
This part of it is not really picturesque: just old rocks, a few of which occasionally shift loose and fall away.
And we can’t actually interact with any notional fences or terraces. But now that we’ve grabbed the chard, we’re told:
At our feet is a patch of soil.
>x soil
Bare dirt, revealed when the chard was cleared away.
We can’t take it as is, but an obvious transformation presents itself:
>remove s from soil
We reset the device to s. With a distinct whiff of mechanics and the summer time, the soil turns into some oil. A can of what appears to be motor oil. It is sludgy and black.
OK, that’s handy, but I just had a terrifying thought. One restoration-gel application later, and:
>remove i from soil
We reset the device to i. The device buzzes, puzzled. It is unable to create anything recognizable called “sol”, or perhaps it just doesn’t have sufficient power to handle the soil.
OK, definitely good that we can’t create a new star on earth’s surface with a simple letter-remover. The possibility of word-tech creating WMD is scary!
Let’s move on – before heading to the beach, let’s clean up the connection back to the stairwell and go south from Webster Court:
>s
Hesychius Street
As the street names make obvious, this part of town was laid out in a different political age, when it was considered more important to commemorate linguistic richness than to standardize practices.On holidays like today, this street is often host to a farmer’s market; though it is now late enough in the day that most of the farmers have given up and gone home, taking with them their twenty-three varieties of pickled olives, their loganberry jam, and their pigs’-feet-in-aspic.
One remaining farmer lazes here, watching his stall.
The namesake here is apparently a Greek grammarian, who was new to me.
>x stall
It appears to belong to the farmer. It’s made of wood and canvas and offers a little shade against the harsh sun. Previous customers have cleared most of it off, but the farmer still has some asparagus, a lime, and a yam.
>x asparagus
It looks particularly tender and pleasant, but I avoid the stuff.
Yet more evidence for Alex being on the young side; come on, you’re old enough to eat your vegetables.
>x lime
A small, wrinkled, intense-looking fruit: it wouldn’t give much juice, but is likely very strong.
>x yam
A yam with whitish skin. Some of the dirt of the farm still adheres to it.
Huh, wonder if it’s a BAD YAM:
Those might be handy, let’s see if we can buy out the farmer:
>x farmer
Contrary to your obvious expectations, he is dressed more or less like anyone else, and is neither wearing quaint overalls nor chewing a piece of hay.
>greet farmer
We greet the farmer.
The farmer makes a little cluck sound which seems to mean that he sees us but doesn’t care to waste an entire syllable on acknowledging it.
We could ask what is for sale.
>ask him about himself
“What is for sale?” we ask.
Well despite appearances I guess he is entirely defined by his work.
“All that’s left this time of day is some asparagus, a lime, and a yam,” the farmer replies.
We want to recommend other vegetables.
>recommend other vegetables
“Have you ever considered selling radishes?” we ask.
“Not really,” he says.
“Radicchio?”
“No.”
“Chicory?” we try. “Cabbage? Carrot? Corn?”
“Again, no.”
“Radishes?”
“You already said radishes.” He has the faintly martyred expression of one humoring us; but it doesn’t look as though he has much else to do.
I’m curious why we’re so dead-set on radishes – don’t think you can make much out of them?
>ask him about market
“What is for sale?” we ask.
“I got some asparagus, a lime, and a yam,” the farmer replies.
>ask him about asparagus
“I’ll have the asparagus, please,” we say.
“Sure thing,” says the farmer.
Welp, that just buys the thing – our wad of cash is big enough that there’s no note that it’s shrunk, even after we pick up the yam and lime too.
There’s a bonus dialogue line after we buy everything:
>ask him what is for sale
“What is for sale?” we ask.
“Oh, nothing,” says the farmer. “But as my mother-in-law is in town, I thought I would make the most of the market day.” He smiles at us.
So far we’ve filled our pockets a bit, but haven’t found much to do with any of this kit. Let’s see if that changes as we head to the beach…
[continued]
7 Likes
It doesn’t accomplish anything useful, but I do have to request that you remove a letter from the wall itself, just to get my favorite response in the game.
Unfortunately, foils aren’t good for cutting—you’re not even allowed to slash at your opponent, only thrust. So it’s more like a long metal rod than a blade. (Sabre is the only Olympic fencing discipline where you can slash, so it needs even more safety equipment.)
I’m now wondering: if you turn a whole crew of marines into a single man, do all their minds end up in a single gestalt body? Like Alexandra but twenty times over?
“After his death his research was continued by his only child, Rutherford Arbot…”
I believe normally the driver also holds only a wand, not reins or a whip, giving the card its basic meaning of “holding opposing forces together through sheer willpower”. The whip seems to suggest that willpower isn’t enough this time.
Or perhaps it’s only because Latin names are avoided (as an illegal foreign influence)? Is there a STAIR anywhere around? (Seems more likely than a SITAR.)
A really cool one, too! He wrote a reference book of the most obscure words he could find, which is incredibly valuable for historical linguistics, and also just for interpreting newly-discovered Greek manuscripts (like the Oxyrhynchus papyri)—sometimes Hesychius is our only clue for what a word means, since it didn’t survive in any other texts.
Yeah, Andra is rich enough that you never have to worry about running out of money—if it’s for sale, you can buy it. This also means that getting Andra’s gear back makes it easier to get Alex’s (the cash can buy a ticket instead of making one out of a THICKET) and vice versa (the monocle tells you that the lock used to be a CLOCK), so if you’re stuck on one of those branches, solving the other will give you a helping hand. (I love this game’s puzzle dependencies!)
6 Likes
[Chapter III, continued]
Having gotten some produce, let’s mess around with it:
>remove m from lime
We reset the device to m. The lime flickers and there is a brief image of a lie in its place - the concept strangely embodied in a physical form - before the power gives out. I guess your device there just isn’t tuned to reify abstracts.
We can get an abstraction-reifying remover? I want it I want it.
Let’s head west from Webster Court now:
Roget Close
A pleasantly sheltered lane in which I learned to ride a bicycle, and where my friend Lucy used to live, before she and her parents moved off-island. Restrictions were looser even twenty years ago. Our old schoolhouse is just west of here.If you look just north between the houses, you’ll notice also the footpath down to an almost-private beach. It used to be open, but it’s now gated off, and built into the gate is a chic modern sculpture.
Man, there are limits on emigration? This definitely is an authoritarian government, what kind of monsters mess with folks’ freedom of movement (CW, anti-trans hate).
>x school
It’s where I went to school until I was twelve, as did most of the kids in this area. It’s an old building with big arched windows and faded floorboards, and in the afternoon the schoolyard smells of spilled milk going sour in the sun. From this direction there’s not much to see but the screen of palm trees in front.
>x trees
They aren’t the very tall and graceful kind, but a stumpier variety, forming a sort of vegetative colonnade in front of the school building. There’s some gum stuck to the base of the nearest tree.
Oh, hello!
>x gum
The lump of blue-green gum has largely dried, but is still intensely unappetizing.
Let’s yoink that – maybe we’ll find an m-to-n device and then we’d be in business.
>x gate
A gate of wrought iron bars between two sturdy columns, too close to climb through and too tall to climb over. Built into the right-hand column, next to the gate latch, is a curious sculpture.
>x sculpture
The base of the sculpture is a cone about four feet tall. On top of that is a flat circular pedestal, and there is a mirror that rotates around the outer circumference. The mirrored surface faces inward, so that it is sometimes reflecting whatever might be on the pedestal (currently nothing) and sometimes concealing it from view.
…huh, my puzzle-sense is tingling. I can’t successfully identify any sub-components, nor can I rotate or turn the pieces, so for lack of a better idea I do something I find funny:
>put yam on pedestal
We put the yam on the pedestal.
The mirror rotates in leisurely fashion, and when it is done there is a May.
This is the sheet for the month of May, torn from a calendar. Someone has put a gold star on the 21st, and “Dinner with the Shaplys” is penciled onto the 30th.
There is a dismissive blatt from the monocle, and transposed over the May is a faint, greenish image of a yam.
The gate clicks open.
[Your score has gone up by one point and is now fifteen.]
Oh wow! I was uh not expecting that. So this is a reflection tool, which is all well and good, but why did “may” get interpreted as “some specific person’s social calendar for the month of May”, which then unlocked the gate? Maybe the lock requires an invitation to open access, and the Shaplys live down by the beach? It’s still an odd thing for the collective unconscious of the island as a whole to conjure up, so maybe there’s some hyper-local paradigm at work here, which is part of why this part of town is so exclusive (by the by, none of these areas are listed in the guidebook, not even the Webster statue, probably because they don’t want tourists). Or maybe there are some more clues about this elsewhere in the game; I feel like I might have done a slight bit of sequence-breaking.
Well, as long as we’re here:
>put gum on pedestal
We put the gum on the pedestal.
The mirror rotates in leisurely fashion, and when it is done there is a mug.
It’s a super-sized black mug with “TEA INSERTION GROUP” on the side in crisp white letters. Must be an employee gift over at Dental Consonants Limited.
That’s a solid joke-mug joke, 7/10.
As I’m faffing around, I randomly get a prompt:
You are reminded of your crew’s skill.
>remember skill
**A Room in a Villa
The bed was draped with sheer salmon-colored fabric. The bedroom opened without doors straight onto the bathroom with a full view of the spotlit bathtub. The toilet was hidden by a frosted glass panel etched with leaping fish. It was the swankest place you’d ever seen, and it made you uncomfortable.“Belongs to a seafood magnate,” your crew-mate Brock was explaining. He was in the middle of setting up a directional mike pointed out the window. The head of R&D at Sibilant Solutions lived right across the way. What you learned from his pillow-talk was enough to recover three missing marquesses.
Then we’re back in the present.
The noblemen were presumably stashed in cinema marquees.
Well, time for a day at the beach:
>n
We slip between the houses and down a path that looks as though it might lead to someone’s back yard. No one has ever put up signage to correct this misapprehension because no one who lives around here is eager to encourage strangers on the private beach.
Soon, however, the footpath begins to descend purposefully towards the level of the ocean.
Winding Footpath
The footpath winds between the villas, sloping steeply downward. It is narrow, and bushes left and right conceal it even from the windows of the people living nearby.>x bushes
Some variety I’m not familiar with: dark glossy green leaves, thick stems. In the right season, and I can’t even remember what season that is, they also grow gaudy pink flowers. But not now. Lots of kudzu grows through and over the bushes – this is one of the few spots on the island where it hasn’t been eradicated, it seems.
At one point along the path the bushes stick out especially far, as though there’s something behind them.
Hmm, interesting – wonder if we can get at what’s back there through a quick transformation?
>remove h from bushes
We reset the device to h. There is a distinct spearmint flavor, and the bushes turn into some buses. There’s a whole fleet of them, perhaps every bus on the island. They’re dusty: the road to Maiana gets dry in the summer.
There is a dismissive blatt from the monocle, and transposed over the buses is a faint, greenish image of some bushes.
Unfortunately, the buses are more than sufficient to bury us under their bulk.
Oops! That was not the intended result (also, wait, “every bus on the island”? Did the existing ones get moved here, or are they duplicated somehow?) Fortunately, we also get this:
That is, that’s what would have happened if we had done something so foolish. Shall we suppose we didn’t? >>
So here’s the death system @Angstsmurf and @Draconis were talking about above – looks like it lets you avoid even the need to type UNDO, since responding “yes” automatically unwinds the turn. Where’s the fun in that, though? Let’s take our death the old-fashioned way:
*** That could have gone better ***
In that game you scored 15 out of a possible 100, in 256 turns, earning you the rank of Escapee.
Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT, UNDO the last command, review your final SCORE, or reveal what ACHIEVEMENTS you have yet to accomplish?
Oh, hello! That’s confirmation that this is a 100 point game, which is helpful for pacing out our progress. And it’s neat that we’ll get a chance to see our missing achievements – I won’t try that option yet for fear of spoilers, but it might be fun to check those out after we’ve won the game properly and see how many we can knock off.
Let’s see if we can deal with the bushes some other way:
>look behind bushes
It’s hard to get a good look under the bushes with all this kudzu in the way.
>x kudzu
An invasive vine grown through and over the bushes.
A kudu – which is a sort of antelope, I think? – might make short work of those bushes, but the no-living-creatures limit on our remover means that won’t work. As for the only remotely sharp thing in our inventory:
> cut bushes with foil
The foil doesn’t offer much of an edge, but that’s probably just as well really.
Is it, Alex? Is it really?
Let’s not hang around here tempting fate – or rogue buses – any longer:
>n
We continue down until there is a chink of a view of the sea. Then the path descends through a few last hairpin twists among rocks, and comes out suddenly on a little beach.
Private Beach
This is little more than a strip of fine yellow sand, perhaps twenty meters from side to side, and five from the hillside to the waterline. A little sage grows on the hillside, escaped from some garden, along with wilder plants. Above, at the top of that slope, are houses with balconies overlooking the sea, but from this angle it’s impossible to see much of them, or for them (you’ll have to take my word on this) to see us.Something green and plastic just barely pokes out of the sand.
>x sand
It’s baking hot.
>take sand
Sure, we could wander off with a handful of sand, but we could hardly shift any significant portion of the beach. And then we’d be making a mess and dribbling sand grains everywhere.
Making it easier for our enemies to track us might not be the best idea, I’ll admit. We can’t make sad or and, so we’ll leave the sand be, at least for now.
>x sage
Dark green leaves furred with silver prickles.
>remove s from sage
We reset the device to s. The sage flickers and there is a brief image of an age in its place – the concept strangely embodied in a physical form – before the power gives out. I guess your device there just isn’t tuned to reify abstracts.
Oh we are going to get into so much trouble once we find a properly-tuned gizmo.
>remove e from sage
We reset the device to e. There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the sage turns into a sag. The sag comes in the form of a doll-sized house with a distinct dip in the roof.
That feels much more metaphorical than we’re usually allowed to get away with, but I guess I can’t object, even though I don’t have much use for… whatever this is.
>x green
All that’s visible from here is the tip of something green.
>take it
We get the funnel. A gaudy green plastic toy suitable for funneling water and shaping conical sand-turrets. It’s all sandy.
Hmm, maybe something we could turn into a tunnel later, once we’ve got the relevant device? Or fennel? Either way, best for it to be clean:
>wash funnel
Washing things in ocean water tends to leave them a bit gritty afterward, or even stained with rings of dried salt.
Still better than nothing, but I guess we’re just feeling extra fastidious today. No big deal, we can just swing by the fountain in the park.
Well, even if we can’t transform it into anything right now, there’s one thing we can do:
>make sand castle
It would be madness to spend long on such projects when we have so much else to be doing, but we do, for old times’ sake (mine, at least), construct a couple of hasty cylindrical turrets and a protective wall of sorts.
Yay! If we try to expand on our work, though, we’re told:
It would be pleasant to make believe that we were young and had no other concerns but to sit on the beach and make castles. But we both know that’s not the case.
Aww, come on, I guarantee that the Bureau would never expect a super-spy carrying highly sensitive intel to just be hanging out on the beach making sand-castles for hours – this is a brilliant plan!
We’ve run out of ways to stall our forward progress, though, so I suppose it is time to head to the roundabout, and thence, the Monkey. But as we pass Webster Court:
The door to my parents’ house opens and my father comes out. He’s talking over his shoulder: “Sorry, dear, but someone has to be on call.”
My mother answers from inside, but we can’t make out what she’s saying.
“Surge on the grid,” Father replies. “Could be an unauthorized synthesizer, but more likely… yes, exactly. I’ll try to be home before the fireworks.”
He closes the door behind him.
Hastily I take off our monocle and palm it. Father shouldn’t recognize us in our current body, but wearing expensive Bureau equipment in his presence would be a terrible idea.
We open the backpack.
We put the monocle into the backpack.
Huh, an “unauthorized synthesizer”? That sounds like it might have been us, so this is a bit worrisome – perhaps it’s time to pick up the pace now that someone is on to us.
My father sees us from a distance and gives a neighborly wave. “Happy Punctuating!” he shouts.
I wave back rather weakly.
He gets on his small red scooter, checks his helmet, and revs off to the south. Off, apparently, to investigate the synthesizer that put us together. That will go slowly because of the holiday, but I’m guessing there will be Bureau investigators crawling all over the south side of old town in an hour or two.
Okay yeah, this doesn’t seem great.
Still, I can’t help trying to de-sand the funnel – look, I stress-clean, okay? We make our way back to the park:
>wash funnel
We dip the funnel in the water and quickly shake it dry.
>x funnel
A gaudy green plastic toy suitable for funneling water and shaping conical sand-turrets.
Something makes you think of your austere childhood.
Oh, OK.
>remember childhood
Your Childhood Bedroom
A small white room with a free-standing wardrobe full of modest home-made clothes; a plain-hewn bookshelf with Bible, study guides, a dictionary and thesaurus; and a sampler on the far wall that reads, “Our pursuit of perfection is our gift to God.” It’s done in very exact cross-stitch.
Andra’s childhood doesn’t seem as fun as Alex’s – not many sand castles in her backstory, I’d imagine.
East from the staircase we find:
High Street
Hustle, bustle, dirt; ugly American chain shops; lots and lots of people. There seems to be a large organized protest in progress: protesters completely cram the sidewalk to the southeast.The curb is lined with garbage.
To the west, the street turns into a monumental staircase leading to the old fortified area; a cross street heads southeast towards the main roundabout.
From a loudspeaker nearby comes the electronic sound of simulated bells ringing the hour after noon. It’s later than I thought. We’d better get a move on.
(That last paragraph indicates that the status line has updated from “noon” to “early afternoon”, so the clock is definitely ticking).
A high street is British-ese for a shopping district, as I understand it, so that explains our surroundings (and suggests Webster’s reforms might not have been as far-reaching as it could have been).
>x protesters
Hundreds of people pack the sidewalk, wearing slogans and carrying angry signs.
You are reminded of your crew’s heroism.
We’ll come back to that memory, but I’m curious what they’re protesting about:
>x slogans
On every shirt and coat, sometimes screen-printed, sometimes just written on with a Sharpie, is the same message: NOT GUILTY.
You know better than I do how the international media looks at Atlantis. How it presents us as a fat, wealthy plutocracy whose citizens happily engage in atrocities in order to keep hold of our unique advantages. But on most of those human rights issues, it’s not as though we were ever asked. We never voted to do those things. The Bureau simply enacted them as “non-referrable procedures.”
Well that’s chilling – “non-referrable” presumably meaning they’re not up for reform via referenda. Having seen how fancy Alex’s digs are, it sure seems like the Bureau members aren’t beating the plutocrat rap anytime soon, and as for what some of those “atrocities” might be:
>remember heroism
Galley
The scene is the kitchen aboard Slango’s yacht: smaller than the kitchen in a comfortable house, but carefully and elegantly fitted. Brock and Slango were standing around, Slango with a lemonade and Brock with a chilled vodka.The fourth person on the scene was Rivka Coutinho, a prisoner you’d sprung from Atlantean custody. She’d been caught running an illicit Hebrew school while nominally a visiting foreign employee of DCL.
“To not being in Cold Storage,” said Rivka, lifting her own glass. She swallowed and her eyes watered a little.
Rivka had spent the previous seventeen years as an inanimate object in a Bureau warehouse.
“You’ll be with them soon,” Brock said. “But I took these for you.” Silently he passed across the table glossy prints of Rivka’s daughter and granddaughter – a child she had never met.
Oof, yeah, that’s what I figured. The metaphysical black sites are a less lighthearted indication than the hanging chad that this is a Bush-era game.
>x shops
Our eyes pass over them without recognition or attention, really: there is nothing here of any use. It is almost all women’s shoes and clothing, overpriced coffee, toiletries made with products from half a world away.
I don’t think either of us is in much of a consumerist mood right now.
>x garbage
Discarded containers from the assortment of food shops and coffee stores lining High Street.
We can at least try to clean this place up a little – think globally, act locally and all that:
>take it
There are other people paid to perform that task.
There are other ways to do this than picking up the trash, of course:
>remove b from garbage
We reset the device to b. There is a mad-scientist cackle, and the garbage turns into a garage. It is a small but well-furnished garage for minor tuneups and repairs. It even comes with a mechanic: a surprising touch, since letter-removers are usually legally prevented from creating living persons, but sometimes there are glitches if the people are not created directly. Alas, however, it doesn’t come with a car in residence.
The mechanic nods at us.
Umm, that’s a heck of a glitch! Did we just create a human being? Does this person have a soul? A mind? A name?
>x mechanic
I’m a little surprised that you were able to generate this guy, but he seems to have come as part of the implementation of the garage.
>talk to him
We say hi.
>ask him about himself
The mechanic doesn’t seem interested in talking about himself.
>ask him about garage
“What do you think of this?” we ask, pointing to the garage.
The mechanic doesn’t have anything to say in response.
He’s not much of a conversationalist, so maybe he is a homunculus? I am freaking out a little bit here, but neither Alex nor the passersby are reacting much so I guess we’ll just pretend this is normal and walk away quickly before anyone starts asking questions.
>se
Unfortunately the sidewalks, which were never very wide to start with, are so blocked by the mass of protesters that it’s impossible to get by. Besides, if we associate with them, we might wind up getting arrested on minor charges anyway. We need some kind of automotive transport.
Ah, this garage is immediately seeming more useful! We haven’t seen a taxi yet, but maybe we can rent one from the mechanic:
>ask mechanic for car
“I’m looking for a car,” we say.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. “I fix them. I don’t sell them.”
We didn’t have much luck with the buses, and we haven’t found anything that would turn our lime into a limo, so I think we’ll be stuck with a humble car. That might be unwieldy so let’s make sure we’ve got everything we need first:
>give oil to mechanic
We draw the mechanic’s attention to the oil.
“Looks like high-quality oil,” he says.
I suspect we’ll need some fuel, too, so we hoof it back to Roget Close. On the way, we have a “fleeting thought of [our] crew’s skill”:
Fleur d’Or Guest Room
A clean-lined, minimal room, but furnished expensively: fresh-cut tulips in a plain glass vase, high thread-count sheets, vast pillows suitable for the hibernation of giants. The closets feature safes, which is excellent for someone in your line of work, because it tends to persuade guests that their computers are being protected when they go out.You were inside because you’d bribed a housekeeper, and were gathering information from a businessman’s laptop while the businessman himself was downstairs at the bar.
But the Bureau also had an agent, also posing as a housekeeper in the hotel, also up to the same purposes. The business with the minibar vodka was clever, I grant.
Hmm, I’m not seeing any immediate transformations for “minibar vodka”, any guesses in the comments?
Right, back to the Close, which is where that gate with the funky sculpture lives:
>put sag on pedestal
We put the sag on the pedestal.
The mirror rotates in leisurely fashion, and when it is done there is some gas.
It looks like a generic canister of unleaded gasoline.
Generic but useful!
As I’m checking my inventory to confirm that I have everything I think I’ll need, I notice an untried transformation:
>remove p from apple
We reset the device to p. There’s a smell of fermenting apple, then cider, then something more malty. In the apple’s place there is now a glass of nutbrown ale.
>drink ale
I don’t think our nausea makes drinking such a great idea.
Huh, are we nauseated from the synthesis? Good to know! At any rate, since we’ll be driving soon that would be a doubly bad choice.
Let’s zoom back to the High Street and get this done:
>put gel on chad
We dip out a fingertip-coating quantity of gel and rub it gently onto the chad. With an audible SPLORT, the chad becomes some chard.
>remove d from chard
We reset the device to d. With a distinct whiff of faint fishiness, the chard turns into a char. It’s a troutlike freshwater fish of the northern countries. It is dead, needless to say, and would make someone a nice supper if they knew how to clean and cook it. Our skills, however, are not up to the task.
>remove h from char
We reset the device to h. With a distinct whiff of metal parts and oil, the char turns into a car. It is little larger than a toy, but that is what you want when driving on the streets around here. Any substantial vehicle wouldn’t fit down the winding drives.
Here is how my mother gets around. She takes a 300 Euro Hermès scarf with an orange border and a pattern of prancing horses. She tosses it in the air. As it falls, she shoots it twice, like a clay pigeon: once to take out the F, the second time for the S. And such a car: buttery leather seats, jaguar lines. If someone asks how she gets such good results, she jokes that it’s because of her quality materials.
Suffice it to say that we are not similarly blessed.
The car is far too large for us to carry, and falls onto the ground.
I sort of can’t believe that worked! But we’re beginning to see one reason Atlantis is so dominant – beyond its weapons, it can outmanufacture any country’s automotive industry just by growing a big field of chard. Sure, we’re now learning that there’s some materials-dependence, where the quality of the source object impacts the end result, so there needs to be economic investment somewhere up the supply chain to produce luxury goods, but this is a heck of a supply chain.
>enter car
We open the car door: perhaps unsurprisingly, it comes without an effective lock system.
We get into the car.
>drive car se
The extremely primitive dial in front of us is pointing all the way to the left. I think that’s its way of saying it’s out of fuel. At any rate, the engine won’t start.
I’d like to ask why the car does not run.
Not sure we need to bother the creepy golem about this, I think we can figure it out:
>put gas in car
I deeply fear automotive maintenance, but I can (just) manage to pour in the fuel… and I think that’s done it.
My response would be to ask why the car does not run.
[Your score has gone up by three points and is now eighteen.]
>drive car se
The car refuses to run properly: evidently you got us a lemon. It’s going to take some tuning up before it will go.
OK guess we will need some help.
>ask mechanic about car
“There appears to be something wrong with my car,” we tell the mechanic.
He has the somewhat cow-like expression of all fake people, but he nods gravely and has a look. “It hasn’t been maintained,” he says, on inspection. “You got any motor oil?”
>give oil to mechanic
We climb out of the car.
“Will this work?” We hold out the oil.
“Should do,” he says. Rolling up his sleeves, he goes to work on the car. There is no small amount of banging and muttering, but finally he stands back and announces that he believes it is now in working condition.
We could thank the mechanic.
[Your score has gone up by three points and is now twenty-one.]
>thank mechanic
“Thank you, that was a great help,” we say.
He nods.
We could ask whether the car is fixed.
>ask whether car is fixed
“Is the car fixed now?” we ask.
“The oil is in,” the mechanic says. “Should run all right.”
Looks like the job is done, so thanks, Mr. Mechanic! Try not to blame me when the existential horror of having no past and no future once Bureau goons with restoration gel come to clean up the street catches up to you!
>drive car se
We switch on the ignition and the car comes to life. Smelly, trembling, putt-putting life, but still, not bad for something we conjured out of a vegetable picked outside my parents’ place.
Roundabout (jammed into the car)
We are jammed into the car with our knees almost at our chin, looking out through the bulbous little windshield. The motor is growling like a housecat with pneumonia.The traffic flows in a tight circle around a statue which we can never see clearly.
The hundreds of people are carrying angry signs and wearing slogans.
Confusing signs point in various directions: northeast to Deep Street, northwest to High Street, south to Long Street, east to Tall Street.
The car is making an unpleasant raspy growl.
[Your score has gone up by five points and is now twenty-six.]
Can we see more of the protestors from this angle?
>x signs
They say things like “No Referendum = No Responsibility,” “NOT GUILTY,” and, more daringly, “The citizens of Atlantis have never voted for human rights violations.” Some are just photos of Bureau officials wearing Hitler mustaches.
The protesters can’t say this directly, of course, but what they are protesting is the use of inanimation as a punishment by the Bureau of Orthography. Making someone into an inanimate object, or enclosing him in an inanimate object, is not technically murder, but it is considered a massive human rights violation by just about every other country in the world.
Good on these people for making this an issue, especially on a holiday when they could be relaxing in a park. I don’t fully understand why photoshopping Hitler mustaches onto specific officials is seen as less inflammatory than just naming the specific practice everyone knows they’re talking about, though.
>x statue
I’ve seen it before: it’s supposed to be Atlantida, the Spirit of the Atlantean people. Kind of a 19th-century French style of thing: flowing bronze robes, one breast naked, plump fingers clasping an olive branch. But we can’t stop and stare at it with the traffic the way it is.
Er, if Atlantis is named after the Atlantic Ocean (which I think it is), shouldn’t that be Atlas? I guess he’s a little less inspiring to sculpt in 19th-Century heroic style, though.
We could head south towards the university, or east to the Bureau of Orthography if we were feeling very daring, but we’ve puttered around sufficiently this update; why don’t we make for Slango and drive northeast, towards the harbor and the Monkey:
>ne
Deep Street (jammed into the car)
We are jammed into the car with our knees almost at our chin, looking out through the bulbous little windshield. The motor is growling like a housecat with pneumonia.This road descends steeply from southwest to northwest, passing between white concrete buildings to provide access to the marina – the Fish Market, the Docks, and a bar or two. The street is in deep shadow, protected from sunlight from almost any angle by its narrowness and by the height of the walls.
We can go northwest, southwest to the Roundabout, east, and west from here.
The car is making an unpleasant raspy growl.
That growl’s a bit conspicuous:
>exit car
We switch the ignition off.
We swing the car door open.
We climb out of the car.
And let’s leave it there!
>score
You have earned 26 points:
1 point for using the letter-remover
3 points for passing through the temporary barrier
3 points for winning the gel
1 point for using the gel
3 points for opening the locker
3 points for retrieving the backpack
1 point for using the spinner
3 points for fueling our car
3 points for repairing our car
5 points for traveling by carYou have not yet removed a, c, g, i, j, k, l, o, q, t, v, or z from anything.
The achievements you have accomplished so far include:
Finished tutorial mode
We’ve got over a quarter of the game’s points and used just over half of the alphabet, so that feels like solid progress. Still just the one achievement, though.
>i
We are equipped with the following essentials: a backpack, a flash drive, your H-remover, a monocle, some plans, a roll, and a tub of restoration gel.
We are also carrying some ale, an arm, some asparagus, a clock, an ear, a funnel, Guidebook to Anglophone Atlantis, a heel, a jotter, a letter, a lime, a May, some members, a mug, some oil, and some toes.
The flash drive and the monocle are in the backpack, which is closed for greater concealment.
We are wearing the backpack.
A rather eclectic combination of kit; wonder if we should be storing the plans in the backpack too?
And here’s the transcript:
CM session 3 transcript.txt (88.4 KB)
Next on the thread: no seriously, we need a drink.
7 Likes
No sequence-breaking as far as I know—my interpretation is that the lock responds to any word that can be successfully mirrored, and that it doesn’t have the letter-remover’s limits on reifying abstracts, so it formed the abstract concept of May. Since we’re the only ones seeing it, and Alex thinks more about social calendars than Andra does, we perceive his calendar for the month.
Though, there is the fact that the CODEX > CODE showed the code to the gate right next to it, so maybe there is something hyper-local going on here.
Brilliant—anyone seeing the MARQUEES would assume they had to be genuine, since you couldn’t remove the SS in the middle without also removing the S at the end. But the criminals separated the three, removed the S’s, then put them back together. A very devious scheme!
Also, a little linguistics joke here: a “sibilant” is a consonant like the S in “sip” or the SH in “ship” that has a lot of high-frequency noise in its spectrum. They carry better than any other sound, which is why they’re usually the only thing you can hear when someone is whispering, and why you want to avoid them if your goal is to not be overheard. It seems the CEO of Sibilant Solutions hasn’t learned about that flaw yet!
We should remember that for later—there’s that listing of what letters we’ve removed and what we haven’t, right? And I don’t think I’ve seen another Z anywhere.
Yeah, I’m not sure why a SAG and a CODE aren’t abstract, when an AGE is. My current rule of thumb is that if you could EXAMINE it in a standard parser game, it counts as concrete—you could EXAMINE SAG in a roof or EXAMINE CODE on a keyboard, but probably not EXAMINE AGE except in something like Indigo.
Honestly, it seems like making a SAND SOMETHING and turning it into a SAD SOMETHING could be a useful tool for getting more equipment!
More or less a homunculus, yeah. He exists because a garage without a mechanic isn’t really a garage, but he has no existence beyond that—no name, no thoughts, no independent existence if you put restoration gel on the garage again.
I imagine that created people can talk and act the same way ChatGPT can: because they’re mimicking what’s in their training data (or in the collective consciousness), not because there’s any actual mind behind it.
“Atlantida” is actually the Modern Greek descendant of Ancient Greek “Atlantis”! (Well, when it’s transcribed into the Latin alphabet, at least.)
“Oh no, officer, these aren’t anything illegal or contraband, I was just out buying a pan to cook with!”
5 Likes
There’s only one transformation I can think of for a naked wall, but I’m not sure I’ve found one yet? I’ve found a bunch of objects that parse as WALL, but their proper names are things like “decaying old wall”, “house-wall”, “broken edge”, “blank church wall”, etc.
Though interestingly, as I was wandering the map spamming X WALL I got this response in the beach path:
> x wall
Now that you mention it, I do vaguely recall something about a shrine in this area,but we can’t make it out under the bushes right now.
So that’s a clue as to what’s under those bushes though it definitely seems like a letter-remover with the safeties off is going to be the key. Anyway, will keep an eye out for someplace where I can do this particular piece of mischief.
Oh, interesting nuance!
Thankfully I’ve only found staircases so far, but this is a worrisome possibility.
A nerd after my own heart 
Oh, does it open for any reflectable object?
> put gum on pedestal
We put the gum on the pedestal.
…
The gate clicks open.
Makes for an easier puzzle, though I enjoyed the logic around the calendar.
Anyway the hyper-local thing is interesting to me because of course in Mage, the will/paradigm of the person doing the magic shapes the result; the background consensus constrains how far certain rules can be pushed, and makes certain transformations easier than others, but the question of subjectivity is easier to answer. So I keep looking for indications that at least some of this technology cues off of the intent of the user in some way, since it would square a number of circles, but so far I don’t think I’ve seen any hints to that end.
Well, we’ve found a BRONZE statue, so if we get a life-creating remover we could maybe turn that into a Buddhist monk (BONZE) and then into a BONE. But that’s a lot of rigmarole that requires the same thing we’d need to make the kudu.
That seems reasonable, and if that’s the case, Atlantis has basically solved world hunger (you’ll never run out of garbage, and if you’re a meat-eater who’s OK with killing “natural” animals to eat, I can’t see why you’d object to butchering and eating a brainless automaton in the shape of a human).
Why are you looking at me like I’m a monster? I’m a sane man, I tell you! Sane!
Oh I hadn’t even thought of that!
> remove l from plans
We reset the device to l. There is a mauve cloud, and the plans turn into some
pans. A set of flat skillets in cast iron: extremely bulky and heavy.> remove s from pans
We reset the device to s. There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the pans turn into a pan. An omelet-sized skillet in cast iron.> take pan
We take the pan.
That feels safer!
3 Likes
You know, I hadn’t remembered (or maybe didn’t notice at the time? I don’t remember which order the games came out in and/or which order I played them in) that Andra’s backstory is basically having been the main character of Bee. Since they came out the same year I guess the similarities make sense, whether it’s intended as a reference or was just something Short was thinking a lot about at the time. (And it’s a useful background for a character who presumably needs to be good at spelling and vocabulary for her word-manipulation shenanigans, of course!)
7 Likes
BONZE also seems like the sort of word that would be forbidden in Atlantis. They have a carefully-nondenominational church and all, but actual Buddhism seems like a threat to the Bureau’s control.
I suspect a “side effect” creation like the mechanic isn’t as detailed as something generated directly, which is how it slips past the letter-remover’s filters. It exists in order to make the garage be a garage, but nothing beyond that—if you cut it open, you find an undifferentiated mass with the consistency of styrofoam, and the mechanic keeps acting as if nothing is wrong, since its “programming” wasn’t prepared for anything like this.
I’ve been trying to think of things that could be profitably turned into food en masse, and coming up blank—it’s hard to find things cheaper than bulk grain, right? So you’d want something small that turns into something much larger.
We might also be able to make some abstracts without using the letter-remover now—a NAP and a SNAP both seem like they’ve got potential!
I’m also curious if a single PLAN is as dangerous as the whole stack of PLANS. Is it still an illegal espionage plot, or is it a blueprint or something like that?
3 Likes
A comment from the source code, right above the implementation for the letter from Andra’s brother:
[Andra’s backstory was based in the idea that she was an extraordinarily good speller, and I imagined a whole history for her, in which she had been a homeschooled spelling champion who ran away from home when she was disappointed by her parents’ reaction to her coming in second place nationally. Slango had seen her on television and so when he recognized her on a street, he picked her up and inducted her into his smuggling gang.
There wasn’t room to tell that whole story in Counterfeit Monkey, and eventually I spun that story off as Bee, a Varytale novella which takes place in more or less the real world.
Nonetheless, Andra retains some pointers to that history.]
10 Likes
Very much enjoying this thread; it’s been a fun way to revisit the game and see things I missed on my playthrough!
I don’t 100% remember, but I’m assuming using the N-remover here would be an alternative to turning the sag into gas!
5 Likes
I think that’s actually the “easy mode” solution; “hard mode” locks out the easiest solutions to several puzzles (FUNNEL > FUEL, FOSSIL > FOIL > OIL, GUM > MUG) so you have to use alternate solutions like SAGE > SAG > GAS.
4 Likes
Oh, that’s funny – I’ve never played Bee, but now that y’all have mentioned it this totally makes sense! Sounds like there’s good commentary in the source; I might try to look at that after the game proper wraps up (though I said I’d do that for my Cragne Manor thread and petered out a third of the way through, so who knows…)
This is horrifying to contemplate; sadly, CANNIBALIZE MECHANIC isn’t implemented so we can’t test the hypothesis (EAT MECHANIC tells us “the mechanic wouldn’t agree with us even if we were feeling better” which doesn’t give us much in the way of specificity).
Right, bulk grain is hard to beat on economic grounds – if you could pluralize, that would be impactful, but we haven’t found letter insertion/swapping tech that would let us turn HEAP OF RICE into HEAPS OF RICE or anything like that. With bespoke manufacturing technology, I suppose you could create TONGS OF WHEAT (with like a rice-krispie-treat sort of process) and the drop the G? But the game probably isn’t worth the candle here; it’s meat and vegetables to supplement grain that probably have the most upside, so the no-live-animals restriction is the biggest issue I think. Honestly CODE to COD is probably one of the best ones we’ve found; mass-printing software code to transform into fish and chips seems viable so long as you can keep the pesky “software” or “source” adjectives at bay.
Oh man:
> put pans on pedestal
(first taking the pans)
We put the pans on the pedestal.The mirror rotates in leisurely fashion, and when it is done there is a snap.
It sounds like a whole chorus of guys in hair gel, snapping for all they’re worth.
I was expecting a cookie, not – whatever this is. At least it’s portable:
> take snap
We pick up the snap.The snap makes an, er, snapping noise.
Interestingly, the game acknowledges this is more of a vibe than an object:
> touch snap
The snap is not really solid enough to treat that way. Might as well be a 3D image.
I can nonetheless do stuff like put it in the backpack (interestingly, the inventory listing clarifies that the snap is “really the smuggled plans in disguise” so we don’t lose track of them; actually, if we drop the snap and try to leave, we automatically pick it up before we go. Turns out this happens with the pan too, and if we leave them as pans, there’s an automatic s-removal. Handy!)
The nap is less ontologically-challenging:
> remove s from snap
We reset the device to s. There is a mad-scientist cackle, and the snap turns into some nap. It’s a wad of fuzz from cloth — similar to lint.
Oh wow, there’s a “second quest” that ramps up the challenge? Interesting!
5 Likes
According to the description of those secret p(l)ans, Atlantis is hard at work trying to develop such a thing. Removing letters is much easier than inserting them, because there’s only one possible outcome, but when you start inserting, you get combinatorial explosion—and thus need a nuclear reactor’s worth of power rather than a AAA battery.
Fortunately, that seems to be a legal limit imposed by the Atlantean government rather than a metaphysical one. I’m sure they make exceptions in order to feed their own population (especially if it means they have a monopoly on cheap meat), right?
Yeah! It adds a bunch of adjectives to things in order to complicate the puzzles. The FOSSIL becomes a SPIRAL FOSSIL, the TOMES become DUSTY TOMES, the PEAR becomes a PRICKLY PEAR, the ARMY becomes a MODEL ARMY, and so on. The intent is to rule out the easiest solutions to any puzzles that give you multiple options, so you have to find one of the harder ones instead.
You get separate achievements for beating the game in easy mode and hard mode, to encourage replaying. Which I love from a design standpoint. A lot of the time, alternate puzzle solutions will never be seen by players, since each person only plays once; this is a great way to ensure they get a bit of spotlight.
(Overall, puzzle solutions in this game rely on properties rather than individual objects, so any body part will horrify the tourist, and any fuel will power the car. The implementation is terrifying.)
8 Likes
Chapter IV - The Bookseller and the Ambler
This time in Counterfeit Monkey, we’re going to the Counterfeit Monkey! After a close run-in with Alex’s folks and constructing a car from humble raw materials, we made it past a band of protestors and found ourselves on the road to the docks where the eponymous bar – and our ride off Atlantis – can be found:
Deep Street
This road descends steeply from southwest to northwest, passing between white concrete buildings to provide access to the marina – the Fish Market, the Docks, and a bar or two. The street is in deep shadow, protected from sunlight from almost any angle by its narrowness and by the height of the walls.Our car – a sub-sub-compact that looks like it might be outraced by a kid on a scooter – is parked nearby.
We can go northwest, southwest to the Roundabout, east, and west from here.
The only thing of note here is the buildings:
Each has its balcony and its laundry flapping on clothes lines; but there the uniformity ends. Some are decorated in a curious fantasia of painted Moorish patterns; others a daring kind of art nouveau, all organic curves and windows that glance out under lowered concrete lids.
Huh, given the material abundance of Atlantis I’d assume everyone had washers and dryers, but I guess this is the poorer part of town.
The map indicates there’s a bookstore to the east, and I can never pass up a visit to one of those – sadly, Alex blocks the attempt:
I’m sure that would be interesting under other circumstances, but we have an appointment to keep.
Oh sure, we could go poking around in your back yard for no reason and make a sand castle on the beach with only the weakest push-back, as soon as I want to waste time suddenly we’re on the clock.
We can go west, though:
Outdoor Café
From this slightly raised terrace, tourists have a view of the activity in the market and out over the docks.Curiously, there’s an acquaintance of yours here: Nexami Engeo is at one of the round black metal tables. He’s a musician, the front man of engeo. Your gang helped him out with some customs issues because of his unusual name.
Nexami nods to us. “Watch out. That table next to you has something sticky spilled on it.” And indeed there is a spill. You were about to lean on it nonchalantly.
I’d like to say thanks for pointing out spill or ask what he is doing in Atlantis.
With a provocation like that, I can’t resist trying to show off my devil-may-care rakishness:
lean on table nonchalantly
(Adverbs are almost never necessary. Retrying that as "lean on table ".)
They are fixed in place.
Well, probably for the best – we’re kind of borrowing this body, best not to get it too sticky.
Let’s look around before getting into conversation:
>x market
From this angle and distance, all you can see is the open space and a few awnings. It’s not the best time of day for this kind of thing anyway.
>x tables
The wobbly, tipsy kind of table that jog at a touch and spill your coffee everywhere.
>x umbrellas
They carry advertisements for brands of liqueur and beer.
>x engeo
A big man, both tall and stout. He hasn’t reached overweight yet, but it looks like a matter of time. He’s wearing a rocker jacket and jeans.
>x jacket
It’s black leather. It might make the wearer look fierce if he didn’t have such a round dimpled face.
>x jeans
Blue. Ordinary cut. I’m not really an expert in fashion.
OK, let’s see what he’s up to:
>ask what he is doing in atlantis
“So, what are you doing in Atlantis?”
“Doing a show tonight,” he says. “Up on the City Walls.” This is only partly a lie: you know that his main business in town is some sort of computer science contract, and that it’s largely cover that his band is playing in the Serial Comma Day festivities.
Nexami stands up and mutters something. I have a little trouble with his Scottish accent – we don’t get a lot of that around here, for obvious reasons – but you interpret it as him saying he’d better go pay up.
He heads into the interior of the café.
OK, not much for conversation, which makes sense given we’re undercover. Just for completeness’ sake, I UNDO and try the other conversation option:
>thank him
“Hey, thanks.”
He makes a you’re-welcome gesture and goes back to contemplating the sea view.
And then he likewise goes in.
Well, our attention’s already been drawn to a salient item here:
>x spill
It looks like a quantity of red wine, just waiting to stain some vulnerable bit of clothing.
>take spill
It’s not the kind of thing we can just pick up and carry away.
There’s an obvious transformation or two:
>remove p from spill
We reset the device to p. There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the spill turns into a sill. It is a bit useless and disembodied without an accompanying window, but here it is: a board of white painted wood.
Seems marginally useful. What else can we do?
>put gel on sill
…
>remove s from spill
We reset the device to s. There is a sky blue cloud, and the spill turns into a pill. It is small, round, and blue. There are no brand or generic markings to indicate what it might do.
What could go wrong?
>eat pill
We toss the pill into our mouths and swallow it dry.
There is no immediate reaction, but after a few minutes a cramping pain begins to spread through our stomach, and it becomes difficult to breathe. Yellow and blue spots float in front of our eyes. Our skin begins to itch. Dimly I wonder whether these symptoms correspond to any real medical condition or whether the pill is simply poisonous by invention; but we are not clear-minded enough to go on thinking these sorts of thoughts for long.
OK that, that could go wrong. We’re given the option to rewind, but I decline it for now to check in on the death message:
*** We have poisoned ourself ***
In that game you scored 26 out of a possible 100, in 346 turns, earning you the rank of Petty Criminal.
“Petty Criminal” is a bit demeaning, but maybe we’ll find an r-inserter sometime which will make it a more attractive prospect.
Anyway, we back up and pocket the pill in case we need it later – we don’t want to poison ourselves, but there might be some other candidates…
We can’t get into the cafe proper:
>in
"When we approach, a girl comes to the window and waves us off. “We’re just closing up. No new customers!”
So we’ll head northward, which should take us only one step away from our goal:
Fish Market
Not very fishy at the moment, in fact: all the real trade happens in the early morning; then there is a period of tourist trade when the seafood sale tails off and most of the purchases are of polished conch shells and starfish; and then a little after noon the area clears out completely, leaving only briny rivulets on the concrete.A tall, stern woman is standing in the middle of the market. She wears the black caped uniform of an Authenticator, and a monocle just like mine. And I don’t think I want her to see us.
Just east of here is a rusting corrugated tin building, which was built to house various possessions of the fishermen.
Ruh roh! That doesn’t seem like a routine inspection, and that monocle would indicate there’s something fishy about us. Admittedly, given our surroundings that might help us blend in,
>x woman
She isn’t looking our way yet, but she will be any minute now.
Yeah she’s bad news – let’s skedaddle. Can we just duck past to get to the Monkey?
>n
You assess the distance and work out that there’s too much open space between us and cover if we head north. The tin hut to the east is the only real option.
Well, if there’s only one option:
>e
While the Authenticator’s back is turned, we slip inside…
Tin Hut
Most of the light in here comes from circular windows punched into the tin walls just under the ceiling. From the inside, the building looks both larger and more sound than it appears from outside: there are plenty of sturdy struts supporting the roof and keeping the walls upright.Various tarpaulin-covered masses fill the room.
A trap door is set in the floor.
Sometimes smugglers and forgers have been known to stash things in here, since the building is close to the docks but rarely attracts the interest of customs officials.
We catch our breath and look over our belongings to see if anything suspicious is showing. The S-remover and the plans might be a little too conspicuous.
Ominous sounds come through the windows, but we’re at the wrong angle to see out.
Phew. We’d been careful about hiding our stuff, but in the inventory-juggling attendant to puzzle-solving, we got a bit sloppy. We quickly make the plans into a pan, stash it and our remover into the backpack, and close it up – that should help if we get nicked, though hopefully we can avoid that! Maybe we can just wait the Authenticator out – we need to catch up on our guidebook-reading, if nothing else. Deep Street isn’t listed, and while there is a cafe in the index it’s not the one we just visited:
> look up cafe
A popular multiethnic eatery in the university district, best known for
having been the meeting place of Milford Higgate and James Elias.
(We can see that on our map – it’s south of Palm Square)
Speaking of mistaken identity, as I attempt to look up the fish market I learn both it, and the farmer’s market we bought out earlier, are included:
> look up market
The guidebook is lyrical about the phenomenal produce to be enjoyed at the farmer’s market held in Hesychius Street every Saturday and Wednesday and also on special days of observation.
> look up fish market
The fish market, the guidebook explains, may be found at the northeastern part of town near the docks, and holds most of its sales in the early morning.
As for the rest of the environs:
>look up docks
The guidebook gives us to understand that the docks, found northeast of the central town, are a pleasant place to commission short voyages of exploration and to see the island from a distance. It does, however, warn against spending too much time in the adjacent taverns, which have an unsavory reputation.
> look up monkey
The Counterfeit Monkey is a tavern of unsavory reputation near to the
docks, said to be the locale of more fistfights and disturbances of the peace than the rest of the city put together. The tavern is named in honor of a famous linguistic con job and was a regular site for contraband creation and smuggling. In 1929, the Bureau first developed tools and procedures for identifying linguistic fakes, the Monkey was the target of a law enforcement raid; but a lively and committed criminal community soon put the Monkey in business again with new strategies.
…I mean, seems like they’re mostly the old strategies, just done with more subtlety (BTW seems like there’s an “and” missing after “linguistic fakes,” @Angstsmurf).
On the other side of the coin:
> look up customs house
The book offers advice that verges on churlish about how important it is not to commit any type of customs violation.
That’s not especially edifying, and speaking of customs violations, I’m not sure whether the Authenticator is still lurking outside. Maybe we can check on her?
>listen
We hear nothing unexpected.
>hide
A natural impulse, but I don’t think she’s coming in here. And if she did, the last thing we’d want would be to be caught hiding. The key thing is to be in plain sight and obviously innocent.
I mean the point of hiding is not to be caught, but okay, we might need to be more proactive.
>x area
From the shapes visible under the blue plastic, it appears that they are probably tables and stalls, buckets, signs, and other necessary features of the fish market when sales are in progress. There’s a flattish area we could probably scramble onto.
>climb masses
We identify the sturdiest-looking part of the construction and clamber onto it.
More racket comes in through the windows.
>look through windows
We put an eye to one of the windows. The Authenticator is still in sight. Two assistants are in the middle of arresting a man for selling germ-based gems, but she is ignoring this play and looking for something or someone else.
Not reassuring! Can we climb out?
>climb windows
Even if they were low enough to reach, each one has a hand’s-breath diameter. At best we might be able to see through them.
Maybe that trap door leads to an escape tunnel?
>x door
It is a wooden door set into the floor. The hinging mechanism is designed to keep the door closed if possible, perhaps as a safety feature so that people won’t fall into an open hole.
>open it
We open the trap door.
The trap-door makes a creaking noise and slams shut again. They must prop it open when they use it.
If we need to prop it up, that’s probably too obvious to be a good escape route. But let’s check on the Authenticator again, if they’ve arrested someone maybe they’re close to moving on:
>look through windows
We put an eye to one of the windows. The Authenticator is still out there, looking for something.
>g
We put an eye to one of the windows. The coast looks clear. No one from the Customs House is doing a sweep at the moment.
Oh, finally! Let’s get off this pile of junk and out of here before they come back:
>d
We open the trap door.
We get off the tarpaulin-covered masses.
Crawlspace
An awkward, low, concrete-lined crawlspace beneath the tin hut. It smells somewhat like animals; in spite of this it clearly gets a bit more use than anyone would like the customs officials to know about.The trap door, wedged open by nothing, admits the only light.
The only significant thing down here is a crate.
The trap-door makes a creaking noise and slams shut again. I DO NOT LIKE being in the dark in a confined space with potential rats. Sorry, I’m getting us out of here. You can come back later.
We open the trap door.
Tin Hut
Whoops! Okay, so we can get down there but doesn’t look like it goes anywhere, and we’ll definitely need some light before we do.
Right, let’s get out of here:
>w
Fish Market
Not very fishy at the moment, in fact: all the real trade happens in the early morning; then there is a period of tourist trade when the seafood sale tails off and most of the purchases are of polished conch shells and starfish; and then a little after noon the area clears out completely, leaving only briny rivulets on the concrete.Just east of here is a rusting corrugated tin building, which was built to house various possessions of the fishermen.
We can go north, south to Outdoor Café, southeast to Deep Street, and east to the Tin Hut from here.
.
(Flagging the errant period – the Authenticator is gone but some trace remains).
Let’s go down to the docks:
Docks
Here are some dozens of boats tied up: some of them are small to medium-sized fishing craft, some tourist boats for trips around the island, some merely ferries to the deeper harbor where the cruise ships anchor.To the east, up a moderate rise from the sea-level docks, is the imposing exterior of the Customs House. The classical look is only a little undermined by the public-service posters along the front. There passports are inspected and cargo passed under authentication, foreign items renamed or confiscated, and suspected smugglers interrogated.
Immediately west, a sign advertises a pub called the Counterfeit Monkey.
We’re so close to the Monkey we can almost taste it! Fortunately that’s just a metaphor, I doubt it’s got an especially appetizing flavor.
>x house
The building itself is not especially grand, but you have never been on the good side of the people who work there, and that gives you a perfectly justifiable dislike of the place, and the sense that it’s larger than life.
>x boats
I know nothing about boats. You, on the other hand, appear to have an unnerving awareness of which of these craft are here on legal business and which are engaged in some form of smuggling or refugee-assistance.
> x posters
The nearest one shows a kitten drawn in a sinuous Parisian style.
“BOUGHT YOUR PET ABROAD?” demands the poster. “Consider linguistic realignment therapy!”Smaller type goes on to explain that even if you have had your dangerous chat converted to a harmless cat at the border, there is a risk that without proper treatment it will have a litter of foreign-language offspring.
Oh hey, we’ve already seen this poster on the thread!
Wonder whether we can just get out of here without needing to make our meeting?
>swim
Considering the delicacy of our possessions and the distance we need to travel, swimming is not a viable solution.
Guess we do need Slango after all.
>x sign
In the picture, a villainous man threatens a cage full of tiny primates with a primitive Victorian letter-remover. In the background is an enormous bag of cash.
Poor monkeys! Letter-removers can’t create living things, mostly, but they can work on them, which is an inhumane asymmetry.
We could head to our meeting now, but if Slango’s going to whisk us away immediately, we’ll never know what was under the trap door, and that will bug us. Maybe we could pop our head into the Customs House? If things seem to be proceeding as normal, perhaps that’s an indication that the search for us isn’t too intense, and we have time for one last detour.
>e
Customs House
This one building handles both people entering Atlantis by sea and those leaving, so there is an entry line (which feeds out into the city by the door we used) and an exit line (which snakes through from here to the point where boats and ferries board their passengers).There is a long line of people waiting to leave Atlantis, even on Serial Comma Day.
An old war-time poster on the wall shows Atlantida striding boldly forward.
No one is paying any attention to us yet, but I wouldn’t advise spending much time here.
Everyone in line takes three steps ahead.
This is risky but we can at least take a quick look around:
>x entry line
The line is made up mostly of businessmen and scientists and the occasional professor with academic leave to go elsewhere, as well as departing tourists.
Wait, is that really the entry line?
>x exit line
The line is made up mostly of businessmen and scientists and the occasional professor with academic leave to go elsewhere, as well as departing tourists.
Oops! I’d imagine the entry line is largely tourists; it seems like permission to leave Atlantis is quite tightly controlled.
>x poster
The poster is huge, almost as tall as we are, and covers most of a wall. Atlantida, dressed in blue, walks towards the viewer from a bold sunrise background. The legend reads THE SPIRIT OF OUR PEOPLE.
It was part of a propaganda campaign to get the Atlanteans to think of Atlantis as inherently invulnerable, on the off-chance that the belief would create the reality.
And we never were invaded, for whatever that’s worth, though the Axis would certainly have found the island a useful base.
Confirmation that Atlantis wasn’t a baddie in WWII, at least, and also confirmation that the government has tried to make their word-tech more effective by shifting the consensus – this is a core tactic of the antagonist faction from Mage the Ascension (the oh-so-ominously named Technocracy), so seeing it crop up here is both a fun parallel, and also an indication of the way that authoritarian propaganda is a natural strategy in a world where belief structures reality.
(Any analogies to the real world are strictly accidental, of course).
Regardless, nothing seems too out of the ordinary here, so I think we’ve got a window to check out the trap door. Speaking of windows:
>prop door open with sill
We prop the trap door open with the sill.
>d
Crawlspace
An awkward, low, concrete-lined crawlspace beneath the tin hut. It smells somewhat like animals; in spite of this it clearly gets a bit more use than anyone would like the customs officials to know about.The trap door, wedged open by a sill, admits the only light.
The only significant thing down here is a crate.
There’s nothing special about the crate when we examine it, but when we open it:
We open the crate, revealing a watch, a band, and a single discarded leaflet.
>x leaflet
It’s a subversive tract attacking the state’s line on punishing people with inanimate status. It quotes the official state justification (from the days when they bothered to justify it at all) as follows:
There are those who argue that it is just as inhumane to make a man inanimate as to kill him. And indeed it is a form of execution, in that the man is wiped out and some other thing replaces him. Execution, that is, in every detail but one: it is reversible. Many men have been executed in error, going innocent to the electric chair or the noose, and once dead they can never be retrieved.
The personality of a man made inanimate, however, stays behind in the changed object, ready to be retrieved should new evidence come to light; and until that date he is harmless to society, and costs almost nothing to store (as compared to the costs of prison guardianship and maintenance).
It follows up by discussing the problems with this argument: the tendency of objects to “fade” over time so that their original form is completely lost; the fact that an inanimate object can hardly direct its own appeal proceedings; the strong words against this kind of punishment in the Geneva Conventions.
Even on its own terms, “it’s slightly less inhumane than the death penalty” isn’t much of an argument. We’ll grab this; it’s potentially a flag if we get picked up, true, but we’ve already got a bunch of iffy stuff on us, and this might help us blend in with the protestors if needed. What about the loot?
>x watch
An (apparently) valuable watch with diamonds set in the face.
“Apparently” valuable? Let’s get out our monocle and try that again:
>x watch
An (apparently) valuable watch with diamonds set in the face.
There is a dismissive blatt from the monocle, and transposed over the watch is a faint, greenish image of a swatch.
>put gel on watch
We dip out a pea-sized quantity of gel and rub it gently onto the watch. With an audible SPLORT, the watch becomes a swatch. A worthless strip of cloth in a tartan print, a few inches wide and maybe a foot and a half long.
>x swatch
A worthless strip of cloth in a tartan print, a few inches wide and maybe a foot and a half long.
This hardly seems worth the smuggling.
As for the band, it looks like it came with the leaflet:
>x band
A paper strip used to keep printed materials together before distribution.
A ban is too abstract for us to make, so the transformation possibilities here seem limited.
Finally, on to the Monkey! We tidy up our inventory and close everything behind us as we leave – wouldn’t do to get caught in the very last moments before our escape – and at long, long last go in to meet Slango:
Counterfeit Monkey
It takes a minute for us to adjust to the light in here. Built when people were a bit shorter and ceilings were a bit lower, the Counterfeit Monkey is always smoky and never well lit, even in the middle of the day.…and… Slango is not here.
This is bad. Even I can see this is bad. What happened to your confidence in your team? Where are the guys who are supposed to get us out of here?
Something must have gone wrong.
“Help you?” asks Parker the barman unenthusiastically.
We want to ask whether he has seen Slango.
…bugger.
[continued]
8 Likes
[Chapter IV, continued]
We were looking for a Slango but instead we’ve got a Parker. Can we make do?
>x parker
His name is Parker, and he is a friend of yours, when you’re wearing your own skin. At the moment, though, it seems like a good idea not to trust these friendships by making our new disguise known.
>ask parker about slango
“I wonder whether you’ve seen an associate of mine,” we say to Parker. “Name of Slango.”
Parker looks over the bar at us. “He comes in here from time to time,” he says. “Very regular customer. Always has about three rum and cokes.”
This is a lie, and therefore a test. Slango doesn’t drink alcohol himself and doesn’t permit drunkenness in his crew.
We could challenge Parker about the rum.
Oh, that’s smart!
>challenge parker
“Must be a different Slango,” we say. “Mine is more of a root beer man. Thanks anyway though.”
“Oh, that Slango,” Parker says, thoughtfully moving the Origin Paste sitting on the bar. “He’s been around town the last couple of days, but not today. If you know his lady friend, you might try her.”
Lady friend? This can only mean Lena, she being the only female native with whom Slango spends much time socially. But you wouldn’t have guessed that she’d advanced to the status of lady friend. Either way, Lena is a rather odd woman who keeps a used bookstore off Deep Street.
We could ask whether we can have the Origin Paste.
Whew – this is inconvenient, but I was worried the gang’d been rolled up. Slango taking his eye off the ball for some mid-day canoodling isn’t great, but could be a lot worse.
Let’s see if there’s anything else we can learn about our man Parker.
>ask parker about himself
What would you like to do: ask what he thinks about the Bureau or ask whether he hates customs officials?
>ask parker what he thinks about the bureau
“What’s your opinion on the Bureau of Orthography?”
“I think it’s just that little bit more corrupt and oppressive than usual for a governmental body,” he says. “I’m not in favor, but I don’t fool myself that everything would be wine and roses everywhere else, either.”
We want to ask whether we can have the Origin Paste.
>ask him about customs
“Do you hate Customs officials?” we ask.
“Naw. Not running anything myself, am I?”
We want to ask whether we can have the Origin Paste.
…I’m not sure why I should want Origin Paste?
Our internal monologue seems awfully insistent upon it, though.
>x paste
A cake of pale purple: it is able to disguise letter-reformed objects so that they don’t look like obvious frauds, or even show up under authentication.
The only problem with it is the distinctive smell.
The Origin Paste is powerful stuff, and worth a good bit of money.
>smell paste
Lavender wafts back at us.
Oh, I see – even with that drawback, I can think of all sorts of uses for this!
>ask him about paste
“That Origin Paste for sale?”
“Well now,” he says, grinning, “that would surely be illegal, would it not? Origin Paste is after all a controlled substance in this country, due to its unhappy association with fraudulent activities. On the other hand there is no law against someone winning the Origin Paste in a completely legitimate game of chance or skill.”
…this seems like a hell of a loophole. I guess there’s an analogy to Prohibition, where the major laws were against sale, transportation, etc., rather than possession and consumption as such? But that was due to limitations specific to federal power under the U.S. constitution, which as it was interpreted at the time allowed Congress to regulate interstate commerce but didn’t give it a general police power to regulate private conduct of a purely intrastate nature (the exact contours of what counts as “interstate commerce” expanded substantially during the 30s and 40s, so Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause is now seen as much broader). Particular states definitely did criminalize mere possession and consumption of alcohol, and it’s a bit silly of Atlantis not to follow suit here, as it doesn’t seem like it has any kind of federal structure that would prevent it from doing so.
Regardless, wonder what kinds of game’s he’s talking about?
>l
Counterfeit Monkey
Infamously this pub was raided in 1929, the year that the Bureau developed its first meager attempt at an Authentication Scope, and dozens of smugglers and fraudulent businessmen went to jail. But neither that raid nor subsequent scrutiny has ever shut the place down entirely. Built when people were a bit shorter and ceilings were a bit lower, the Counterfeit Monkey is always smoky and never well lit, even in the middle of the day.The clientele are currently engaged in a game of darts, while the barman watches and practices a sarcastic wit on those who embarrass themselves. There is also a quantity of Origin Paste sitting out on the bar.
>x darts
Several guys are engaged in a lively game of darts. By their tattoos, you recognize them: they have a regular darts game in which smuggling drop-off coordinates are passed back and forth in the form of scores and the game’s surrounding banter.
The result is that the Bureau has been trying to tape their communications for months without ever turning up evidence of wrongdoing.
Clever! Not sure we’re any good at darts, but guess you don’t know until you try.
>ask parker about winning
“Explain this game as though I have no idea what you’re talking about,” you say, leaning on the bar in an interested fashion. Are you flirting with Parker? No? Okay. Good to know.
“It’s a designated challenge game,” says Parker. You’ve seen this played before, but he explains the rules anyway.
"There are two contestants, one challenger and one defender.
"The challenger chooses any object he likes and shows it to the moderator ahead of time.
“The defender, without seeing the object, stipulates a general category. The challenger has five minutes to turn his designated object into an item that fits the defender’s category, or he forfeits his ante.”
We want to play the game.
You have a fleeting thought of past experience playing games.
>remember playing
The three of you were watching the contest at Counterfeit Monkey. This time the prize was a bottle of Dove Wing Absinthe, and the latest contestant was trying to letter-remove her way to an object the size of a pebble.
Slango lifted his root beer. “These guys are in a rut. It’s all ‘make a liquid’ and size-based challenges. I want to see some demanding categories. Strawberry-scented. Paisley. Pachyderm-themed.”
You shrugged. “People L-remove tiles,” you said. “You can get a letter-made tie any color you want.”
“Import Category 5,” Brock said. “Now that would be a strong challenge category.” Under Atlantean customs law, Import Category 5 means things that are edible, but not fruits or vegetables – everything from drugs to chicken breasts. “Clear, but it rules out a lot of overly productive agriculture words.”
…so no, not darts. I like this, it makes sense this is a game people would play, especially smugglers whose livelihood depends on clever word-manipulation. Seems like it’d be pretty hard, though? Might as well take a shot, though, what do we have to lose?
>play game
“I’d like to play that,” we say.
“Excellent. Oh, I did mention the small matter of the entry fee?”
I get out the roll of bills and he peels off two twenties.
“Thank you. Now, you pick your entry article, and I’ll ask one of these good gentlemen to suggest a defense category.”
Oh, money, we can lose money. I’m pretty sure our roll is functionally infinite, though (and if it isn’t, well, there’s a picture of a monkey right outside…)
…let’s see, what do we have that could work? Memory-Slango said “liquid” is a popular defense category, and that’s a pretty easy one to be ready for:
>show funnel to parker
“Right,” says the barman. “The funnel it is.”
\He turns towards the group assembled around the dartboard. “Anyone want to defend against this character?” (with a nod at you).
“Something smaller than a pebble!” suggests a woman in the front row. She passes forward her own ante to the bar, and the game is on.
Oh, um, that is not a liquid, and I’m not sure what else we can make out of the funnel beyond fuel (ful is a kind of fava bean stew, and individual beans might be pebble-sized, but alas this play doesn’t work in Anglophone Atlantis). If we’d picked our pear, we could have turned it into a pea, I suppose, but it’s a bit late for that.
“Your time is up, I’m afraid,” says the barman. “No luck this time, eh? Pity.” He divides your cash ante in half: half for the house, half to the defender who bet against you.
We could play the game again or complain that the game is unfair.
>complain
“This game is unfair,” we say. “You’re the moderator, but you have a vested interest in the defender continuing to win, because you get half the ante every time!”
“The house puts up the stakes, remember,” he says. “But the Counterfeit Monkey has been running this game for years, and would people keep coming back to play if it were rigged?”
Of course, the regulars usually play defense and newcomers offense, which makes the game into a device for fleecing strangers for the benefit of the bar and its usual patrons. But sometimes someone is allowed to win, if they’re clever.
We could play the game again.
Eh, maybe we shouldn’t be playing pub games when there’s a Slango to un-sling from his lover’s arms. Fortunately we don’t need to go far – when we revisit Deep Street, its description has been updated:
The Aquarium Bookstore is to the east. It is an esoteric bookstore (and purveyor of other things), but one whose owner has helped you in the past. That would be Lena, the woman that we need to talk to about Slango.
I assume this place was originally an antiquarian bookstore, but years of word-tech has led to some drift – or possibly a New Age, Aquarian one. Either way, the name does put me in mind of the Acqua Alta bookstore in Venice, which was a highlight of my trip there a couple years ago). Anyway, Alex doesn’t stop us from going in this time:
Aquarium Bookstore
The shop takes its name from the collection of fish mounted on every wall: swordfish, bass, other things I don’t recognize. Underneath these dubious tokens, the walls are covered with bookshelves, and there are stacks of books on the floor where the shelves have proven insufficient.The merchandise consists mainly, but not exclusively, of books, and the selection caters to odd tastes. You once picked up in here a book about a man who R-removed a wrench, and then had his way with it. You and Brock had a good time with that one for the next month and a half.
Lena is present, all right. In fact she watches us keenly the instant we come into the shop. Lena is an associate of Slango’s. You hadn’t realized that had crossed over into a romance. Slango has never, ever in your recollection dated anyone. And now this.
“Happy Serial Comma Day,” she says.
We want to ask whether she has seen Slango or say who we are.
Now it’s my turn to be squeamish – that wrench/wench story is super gross no matter how you slice it. If we assume that, like the mechanic who came with the garage, the wench would be largely mindless and made of styrofoam bits, I guess it’s not sexual assault, but it’s still unpleasant to think about.
Look, a fish!
>x fish
None of the fish has been dusted in the last decade. The collection presents a slightly mournful air.
>x books
Our eyes scan over the merchandise and pick out Pat and Chris and the Homonym Paddle.
>x book
Our eyes scan over the merchandise and pick out two copies of Queen’s English.
>x stacks
Our eyes scan over the merchandise and pick out Indian Summer inexplicably filed under “suspenseful travel guides”.
>x stacks
Our eyes scan over the merchandise and pick out two copies of Quagmire Manifesto inexplicably filed under “wedding steampunk”.
…I feel like these are jokes I’m not getting.
>x lena
She has grey hair in a curly cloud around her head, and she wears a long patchwork skirt and leather sandals. But her eyes are keen.
>x skirt
It falls to Lena’s ankles even though it has been rolled over several times at the waistband. The fabric is mostly scraps of silver and grey and dark blue, but there are here and there some odd sports in other colors.
x sandals
The sort of sturdy comfortable sandals one can walk in for hours.
Hmm, Lena’s vibe seems like it could work with either the New Age or the antiquarian image of this place. She’s not currently shacking up with Slango, but hopefully he’s still somewhere in the place:
>greet lena
We smile.
I’d like to ask whether she has seen Slango or say who we are.
>ask lena about books
“What do you think of this?” we ask, pointing to the merchandise.
This evokes no particular interest.
Not one for small-talk, huh? Well, no use beating around the bush.
>say who we are
“Lena, it’s Andra. And company. Maybe Slango mentioned that I was auditioning a new silent partner.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “But since you’re here, whoever you are, I wonder whether you’d like to have a look at some merchandise of mine that could use a spruce.”
Aha. She wants us to prove our identity; probably has contraband that needs concealing, and wants us to do the deed as proof of trustworthiness.
There’s a brief pause. Lena goes off into a corner and rummages among the suspicious piles of books, and uncovers a box. “C’mere,” she says; and obediently I wander over to that area of the store, which incidentally happens to be tucked away and half-hidden by shelves.
“See here,” she says. “See what you can do with it, eh?”
This seems like a risky move, though I suppose she’s being sufficiently vague that if we were an undercover Customs agent, she might have plausible deniability.
What are we looking at here, though?
>x box
It’s just a cardboard box in which some items of interest have been stored.
In the contraband box are some modems and some preamps.
Lena apparently wants our help getting them into a less identifiable format.
>x modems
If Brock were here, he would know exactly what made these interesting and valuable. All you can guess is that they’re not a form approved by the government.
>x preamps
They aren’t in themselves restricted technology, but Atlantean government slaps a very high tariff on any kind of electronic device not manufactured on the island. This is especially annoying and needless in the case of audio equipment for which there is no local manufacturer.
Not too intrinsically incrimination, I suppose, and not too tough to conceal:
>remove m from modems
We reset the device to m. With a distinct whiff of old book, the modems turn into some odes. A slender volume of poetry, bound between red covers. It looks completely harmless and is written in English.
The blurb on the back describes it as a “collection of meditations” on Atlantis’ imaginary roots, which is to say, a lot of stuff about magic-wielding Phoenicians, Knights Templar, refugees from the Tower of Babel, space aliens, cabalistic mysticism, and Lully’s combinatorics.
It fits in perfectly with the rest of Lena’s selection. Really amazing work. I’ve seen other people who were able to do impressive things with local field distortions – think hard enough and you can prejudice the outcome of a linguistic transition.
But this… this is detail work like I haven’t seen. My hat is off.
Or would be if I were wearing a hat and taking it off didn’t mean making you take it off too.
Lena touches the binding appreciatively. “You’ve even got that little bit of creasing in the spine that makes it look used,” she says. “This is perfect. Only risk is customers wanting to buy it. I’ve got a couple this would be right up their alley.”
Aha! “Local field distortions” – so you can take advantage of micro-level shifts in the consensus to bias the results of your word manipulations, just as we’d been speculating. And on a very fine-grained scale too, it seems like; the woo-woo nature of this poetry indicates the odes are a fit not just for the idea of a bookstore, but this specific one. This is potentially a very very powerful technique, so I’m curious whether we’ll get more opportunities to use it.
The preamps aren’t much harder:
>remove p from preamps
We reset the device to p. There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the preamps turn into some reams. Since each ream is 500 sheets of paper, and there are many reams here, the collection is unhelpfully bulky.
Lena considers the heap of reams contemplatively. “That’s inconvenient, isn’t it,” she says. “And I have a book store, not an office supply shop.”
We want to calm Lena or tease Lena about selling office supplies.
This will an easy fix, so teasing is low-stakes:
>tease
“May I recommend that you branch out into office supply?” you ask. “It’s a lucrative business. Pamphlet-printing is very popular with the subversive element.”
“Not as lucrative as untariffed electronics,” she says out of the corner of her mouth.
Someone comes up to the front door of the shop. Lena goes over, wrenches the door open, and leans out. “We’re closed!” she shouts. “It’s #&@%ing Serial Comma Day!”
The door slams behind her and she comes back over.
“Of course,” she says, contemplating the reams and the odes, “this will be pointless unless we can also fool an authentication scope.”
Oh. Um. Guess we are going to need that paste after all. Might as well clean things up a little bit before heading back to the Monkey, though:
>remove s from reams
We reset the device to s. There is a distinct spearmint flavor, and the reams turn into a ream. One ream, which is to say 500 sheets, of generic printer or copier paper, in white-white.
“That works. Kind of thing I might have around for printing invoices on. I was a little afraid there you were going to go for a ram just to spite me. Don’t know where I’d put one of those around here.”
That’s too much of a temptation, but turns out the collective unconscious was thinking of a sheep-ram, not a ship’s-ram, so we can’t make one. As we’re trying, though, Lena remarks on the monocle we’ve been wearing (I’ve been cutting its output out of descriptions to make them less repetitive).
“Nice monocle, by the way! You do have all the good toys. Suppose it means you can check your work and see whether you’ve really got enough paste on things.”
So yes, another prod to get the paste, unless Lena’s feeling like we did well enough and that extra step of concealment would just be a bonus?
>ask lena about slango
“You wouldn’t happen to have seen Slango about recently?” we ask.
“Slango?” she asks blankly, for all the world as though she’d had a lobotomy. “Is that a board game?”
Alas.
Here follows an extended contemplation of my inventory to see if there’s anything I’ve got that could be made both tiny and liquid, assuming per our memory that those are the categories the patrons will tend to choose. I don’t come up with much, though I do learn that the pear we got from the balance beam – currently in the form of a severed ear – was actually originally a pearl.
It is small, slightly uneven, and pale blue in color. Not worth very much, but genuine.
Wonder how that wound up there?
For lack of any better ideas, I go back to the Monkey and pick the pearl this time – maybe they’ll stay stuck on something small?
>show pearl
“Right,” says the barman. “The pearl it is.”
He turns towards the group assembled around the dartboard. “Anyone want to defend against this character?” (with a nod at you).
“A liquid,” says a gruff man. (“You always say liquid!” complains one of the others. “It’s his favorite thing!” says a third.) But the ante is submitted and the challenge set.
Oh, of course. I change it into pea, on the off chance people primed to see a liquid might turn it into pea soup, but no joy:
>remove r from pear
We reset the device to r. With a distinct whiff of vegetable matter, the pear turns into a pea. Just a single green pea.
If I weren’t violently allergic to peas, I’m sure that would be much less menacing.
Ugh. Still, let’s have one more go and pick the apple, maybe we’ll be third time lucky:
>play
“I’d like to play again,” we say.
“You are a glutton for punishment, but I don’t mind taking your money for nothing. Now, you pick your entry article, and I’ll ask one of these good gentlemen to suggest a defense category.”
>show apple
“Right,” says the barman. “The apple it is.”
He turns towards the group assembled around the dartboard. “Anyone want to defend against this character?” (with a nod at you).
“Import Category 5!” shouts a voice.
The barman raises his eyebrows apologetically and says, “It’s a well-defined category, so I have to allow it: any kind of edible consumable object, be that food or beverage, that does not fall under the botanical import category. So no fruits or vegetables.”
Oh! I guess Brock did try that one out and the crowd liked it. Fortunately, ale is both a liquid and a consumable, non-fruit-and-vegetable object.
>remove p from apple
We reset the device to p. The apple gives way to the now-familiar ale.
“A winner!” says the barman, straightening up. “What do you know? The Origin Paste is all yours, darling.”
This produces a squawk of surprise and irritation from the defendant, and you get the impression that this game has been agreeably fleecing tourists all day. Pity you had to come along and spoil it.
I’d like to ask whether he has any other games going.
[Your score has gone up by three points and is now twenty-nine.]
>ask whether he has any other games
“So, is there anything else I can win? Any other games going?”
Parker laughs. “Not until tomorrow, kid,” he says. “We only run one game a day.”
It feels like we somewhat brute-forced our way through that one – I’d bet there’s an achievement for winning that first try, or with an object that can satisfy all the potential dares. Something to consider for a replay, though, for now we’re moving on with our booty. Lena’s excited to see us:
“Glad to see you’ve got plenty of Origin Paste,” Lena remarks. “It’s such a useful thing to have. Smells so nice.”
We want to quip about paste.
>quip about paste
“Makes a great facial scrub,” you say. “I slather the stuff on.”
“Well, honey, all I can say is, you look so real.” Lena taps her finger against her upper lip.
Oh yeah, great idea!
>put paste on myself
We smear some of the Origin Paste onto ourselves. Nothing obvious happens, of course, but that is the whole point.
“Excellent,” Lena mutters under her breath.
Similarly, there’s no visible effect to slathering paste on the ream and the odes, except…
“Perfect,” Lena says, regarding her contraband possessions with satisfaction. “Welcome back, Andra and Guest.”
We could ask whether she has seen Slango.
>ask about slango
“Now, you owe me one Slango,” you say. “Where’d he get to?”
“Slango and I were catching up. Bless that man, he’s hung like a yak,” she says. “But he got bad news and had to hurry back to the yacht. Said something about not being able to keep an appointment. I take it you’re the appointment? I can try reaching him for you, if you want.”
I’d like to encourage Lena to contact Slango.
…there is a lot of information I didn’t need to know in that paragraph, starting with the fact that Lena is sufficiently well-acquainted with yak genitalia to make them a point of comparison, but let’s move on.
>encourage lena
“That would be extremely helpful,” we say. Perhaps we can finally get off this island and back into our separate skins, which would not be one minute too soon for me.
“Very good,” she says. She goes over to one of the free-standing shelves and takes out copies of Quagmire Manifesto and Seventy Ways to Disable an Authentication Scope. Behind these works of literature she finds what looks like a cellular phone; but it mustn’t be one, or at least not of the usual variety, because the Bureau tightly controls such items.
We hear half a conversation. “It’s me. There’s someone to see… yes, I had her do the contraband… I don’t know, a little taller and a lot less mean… Oh! I see. She looks healthy enough… I’m not running a restaurant! Okay. Okay. I’ll talk to you later, sweetie. Bye.”
Without meeting our eye, she buries the phone back in its previous location. Then she says, “He’s coming in direct. He says go over to Counterfeit Monkey and he’ll be right over as originally planned, and he’s sorry about the wait.”
“Oh! And.” She tosses us a coin. “Have a drink on me.”
I’d like to thank Lena.
[Your score has gone up by three points and is now thirty-two.]
>thank lena
“Thank you,” we say. “We owe you one.”
She smirks. “I get my money’s worth out of Slango, don’t worry.”
I bet you do!
>x coin
It appears to be an as, a Roman coin of very low denomination. (Your knowledge, not mine. Should I ask how you know such things?) It is made of copper and has the letters S C stamped on one side.
There is a dismissive blatt from the monocle, and transposed over the as is a faint, greenish image of a pastis.
Oh, a drink on me indeed.
>put gel on as
We dip out a fingertip-coating quantity of gel and rub it gently onto the as. With an audible SPLORT, the as becomes a pastis. An anise-flavored liqueur. It’s an acquired taste, but now that I’ve acquired it, I like to exercise the acquisition as frequently as possible. You may not be as big a fan, for which I apologize in advance.
>drink it
We sip a little of the pastis: delicious and cooling!
It’s worth noting that getting an as from pastis isn’t something you can do with simple letter-removing; she must have some more exotic tools (a truncator, maybe?) stashed somewhere out of sight.
Time to hit the road, and Lena agrees:
“This would be a good time to stop for lunch and a little siesta,” says Lena, following us to the door. As we go out, she’s rolling down the shades and putting up a closed sign.
Back to the Monkey, and at very very long last, here’s Slango!
Slango sits at a dark table, nursing a root beer. Slango is, of course, not Slango’s real name. He is half criminal, half ideological revolutionary: uncouth, restless, always hungry for a new exploit. Had he been born into a freer society, he might have become a very valuable engineer or consultant. He has been your mentor in crime and your usher into the world of adults.
Slango meets our eye for a long minute without smiling.
I’d like to say who we are.
>x slango
He’s dressed plainly but neatly: clean jeans, crisp white button-up shirt. His face is calm and his voice is even and he could be any age between thirty and fifty. He looked that way when you met him eight years ago, too.
Huh, guess Andra isn’t that old either – sounds like she was still a teen when she met Slango, so she’d be what, mid-twenties now?
>greet slango
“Slango,” you say. “Lena gave me a totally unwanted visual about your yaklike proportions. Guess you also got a yak’s sense of clock time?”
“It was an emergency. I figured you’d go to Lena, and I was right.”
“You were lucky. I knew her a little, but I had no idea you two were making the yak with two humps.”
“No such thing as a bactrian yak,” Slango replies. “My apologies. I assumed that what Brock knows, he passes on to you, and he certainly knows about me and Lena.” He scowls into his root beer. “Nearly gave himself a hernia laughing,” Slango adds under his breath.
I’m inclined to explain Brock’s probable reasons or ask whether we can leave now.
>explain
“She’s old enough to be your spinster aunt and flaky enough to tell your fortune with half a tarot deck and a couple of Uno cards,” you say. “We haven’t got a lot of clues about what your type is, but I doubt Brock would have guessed Lena.”
“She’s thirty-two,” says Slango crisply. “She runs Radio Free Atlantida single-handed with electronics she built herself. And if she were old enough to be my spinster aunt, that would still be my business.”
“So, uh, I guess you guys are pretty serious, then,” you say.
“I’d give her and me better odds than you and Brock.”
We could mutter darkly or ask whether we can leave now.
In fairness, from the flashbacks we’ve gotten so far “you and Brock” doesn’t appear to go much beyond the very occasional mid-voyage booty call.
>mutter
I grumble under our breath about people who are hung up on their personal issues when there are useful jobs to be done.
Raised voices near the bar interrupt you for a moment. “Brock’s run into a little trouble pursuing a profitable opportunity.”
We could ask what the trouble was.
Oh FFS.
>trouble
“Define trouble.”
“I had a pick-up arranged to get him off the island shore all the way down by Maiana last night, but he didn’t make it, and sent no messages. I checked a contact in Bureau Processing, but no arrest file has gone through, so Brock hasn’t been caught. He’s just… missing.”
A dart bounces off the dart board and lands near your foot. A gruff man retrieves it with muttered apologies.
“We can’t leave without Brock,” Slango says, as though you needed persuading.
Or maybe he’s saying that to the me half of us. Right now, it’s true that I’m not keen on the prospect of hanging out in Atlantis. We’re already way behind the plan.
I’d like to complain about the inefficiency of this scheme.
You are reminded of how it started with Brock.
>remember how it started
Navigation Area
Brock was sitting at the controls, with you leaning over him. He pushed you away. “Cut it out. I’m not available every time you decide to go slumming.”It was deep blue summer twilight. He was driving the yacht with one hand on the steering wheel and the other loosely in his lap. You turned to go.
Then we’re back in the present.
Yeah I’m still not getting “star-crossed lovers” here.
>complain
Sorry, but I have to get this out there. “I was really expecting a smoother escape plan when I arranged to work with your operation,” I say.
Slango eyes us with disfavor. “Andra, you got a moron up in your head. Kid – Alex – we aren’t travel agents.”
Raised voices near the bar interrupt you for a moment.
“I’ve got to get back to the yacht; it’s empty,” Slango says. “And I would prefer not to let the Bureau get a good look at me, while your current face is, shall we say, disposable. The trick is, we don’t know where Brock is. If he left a message for us, it’ll be at the dead drop.”
That’s a spot at the public convenience by the town bus station where the three of you leave messages for one another when necessary. Usually quiet, yet anonymous. “We’re on it,” we say.
“Glad to hear it,” says Slango. “Now stop referring to yourself as ‘we’ in company.”
This gives us something to go on, anyway. We give Slango what I intend as a reassuring nod of solidarity.
“Back to the yacht for me,” Slango says. “Don’t let the other half of your head do anything you wouldn’t do.”
“Which of us are you talking to?” I ask smartly.
“Both.”
He heads out towards the docks and quickly disappears from view – returning to the yacht to wait for us to arrive with Brock.
[Your score has gone up by five points and is now thirty-seven.]
For a change, I’m on Alex’s side here – one heist at a time feels like a fundamental rule of spycraft!
Well, at least checking out the dead-drop shouldn’t be too hard; I bet the bus station is in another sketchy part of town where we won’t need to worry too much about official attention.
It’s across the street from the $#%^#$ Bureau of Orthography?
Folks, I’m beginning to think we suck at our job.
Score:
You have earned 37 points:
1 point for using the letter-remover
3 points for passing through the temporary barrier
3 points for winning the gel
1 point for using the gel
3 points for opening the locker
3 points for retrieving the backpack
1 point for using the spinner
3 points for fueling our car
3 points for repairing our car
5 points for traveling by car
3 points for winning a barroom bet
3 points for arranging contact with Slango through his lady friend
5 points for meeting SlangoYou have not yet removed a, c, g, i, j, k, o, q, t, v, or z from anything.
The achievements you have accomplished so far include:
Finished tutorial mode
Well above the third of the points, though we haven’t made much progress with the alphabet this time, and we still just have that single pity-achievement.
Goals:
Here’s what we think we need to do:
Check the dead drop at the public convenience
Easier said than done.
Inventory:
We are equipped with the following essentials: a backpack, a flash drive, a monocle, some Origin Paste, some plans, a roll, your S-remover, and a tub of restoration gel.
We are also carrying some ale, an arm, some asparagus, a band, a clock, a funnel, Guidebook to Anglophone Atlantis, a heel, a jotter, a leaflet, a letter, a lime, a May, some members, a mug, some oil, a pastis, a pea, a sill, some toes, and a watch.
Everything we carry is in the backpack except the ale, the arm, the band, the monocle, the oil, the Origin Paste, the pastis, the pea, the plans, the S-remover, the sill, and the watch. The backpack is gaping wide open so everyone can see what’s inside.
We are wearing the monocle and the backpack.
Our kit is looking pretty robust, at least.
CM session 4 transcript.txt (99.6 KB)
Next on the thread: Oh Brock where art thou?
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A lot of non-US countries just aren’t really big on clothing dryers IME, so that might be the case for Atlantis. I feel like they could produce dryers pretty cheaply out of, say, a clothing dye, if they wanted to.
3 Likes
Yeah, I figure it must be cultural - I dunno, I’ve just heard enough British people complaining about how their clothes are always soggy because their energy-efficient all-in-one washer/dryer combos are just not up to the task that I assume any society with a sufficiently high GDP per capita and robust enough electrical grid would leap at the opportunity to put dryers everywhere. But Atlantis seems a lot sunnier than the UK, I suppose!
2 Likes
Given the author’s interest in procedural generation, I’m guessing these are mix-and-matched.
The description is “Our eyes scan over the merchandise and pick out [one of][a random thing which is part of the merchandise][or][a random number between 2 and 7 in words] copies of [a random thing which is part of the merchandise][at random][one of][or] inexplicably filed under ‘[one-genre]’[as decreasingly likely outcomes].”
But they can in fact be examined individually, and the source code explains the implications they have about Atlantean society! I’ll put that under a DETAILS:
Author's comments
The books at the shop exist to partially explain, justify, and lightly hint other aspects of the game world. I don’t anticipate that all players will have sufficient interest to look at all of them, but someone who is bored or stuck or just a thorough explorer may do so.
The Ba’s Journey hints that the word “ba” is known in Atlantis, so the BALL > BA > BAT chain is possible. Quagmire Manifesto explains a bit of the background for the film reel easter egg. Indian Summer and The Queen’s English hint at the almost sexual fascination some Atlanteans have with foreign words.
Pat and Chris drops in a bit of Atlantean sexual politics that there otherwise isn’t a great deal of space to explore, namely that people tend to be more open to gender reassignment because it can be done so cheaply and reversibly with Atlantean technology. While Alex personally is uncomfortable being manifested in a female body, the idea is not as culturally alien to him as it might be to many others.
Dyslexic Coalition reflects some of the downside: learning disabilities that might be regarded purely as a misfortune in another culture are more strongly and unsympathetically stigmatized in Atlantis.
You will like this one, though:
Written by the implausibly-named Lucius Quagmire, the Manifesto suggests film-making, especially wordless or foreign-language film-making, as a route to undermining the Anglophone hegemony and ‘restoring Atlantis to the community of the world.’ It’s full of stuff about ‘disrupting the simple significance of words’ by building up complex and multivalent metaphorical associations; connotation as more powerful than denotation; thought as triumphant over word.
I wonder how the authorities feel about speaking in grawlixes?
I was curious how exactly this game was implemented, but couldn’t find the code on a cursory inspection. Alas. I’ll do a proper search later—knowing Emily Short’s style, I suspect it ensures you’re always given a solvable puzzle, but the difficulty varies.
Originally a sixth of a pound of bronze, gradually made smaller, lighter, and less valuable until it was approximately a penny. They had a picture of Janus on one side and a ship on the other, so the Roman equivalent of “heads or tails” was “heads or ships”. The SC means Senātūs Consultō—“By Decree of the Senate”.
We know Andra has a “first-letter razor” that she used to turn a clock into a lock; maybe Lena has a last-letter razor too?
Given how her brother writes in his letters to her, that sounds about right.
4 Likes